You're a free person. You don't have to do this.

Therefore you don't have to apologise. That will just make it seem like a burden.

glaring at an old

to darken in the

Well this particular idea strongly interests me. However, I still haven't delivered the animated movie that I've been working on, so I'm not going to commit to anything.

Every category of software gets developed sooner or later. Every week there are new bitcoin-based services opening up, so it will happen.

Assuming you mean SMF (the software behind this forum) I don't think it's worthwhile modifying it.

Anyway, Gavin's idea should be tried outside this forum until it proves itself. If it turns out to work well, not only would it be worth switching this forum to it, but the demand for that forum system from others would drive the adoption of bitcoin.

I think Gavin is on the right track with his "Worthwhile"/"Waste of time" buttons. If people are finding a discussion worthwhile, it doesn't matter whether that's because the ideas are new to them or comfortably familiar to them.

For sure, some forums will become tight groups of closed-minded people. But hey, for a few bitcoins, someone can create a new sub-forum, and with a well-chosen topic and charter the new sub-forum may turn out more broad-minded than the previous one.

In the end, those forums that people find worthwhile will prosper, and the rest will wither away.

I don't think we need a high click rate. It's enough to be sow the seed of an idea in people's heads, that bitcoin does exist as a currency of freedom. When they are ready for it, they will come then.

Yes Gavin, the time has come for this kind of forum, and maybe Bitcoin is the necessary enabler.

I can think of a few existing systems that almost implement this idea.

Answers sites such as Google Baraza or Yahoo Answers issue their own points-based "currencies". You get a certain number of points just for checking in every day, and you can spend those points asking questions. If you answer questions, you can earn more points, and you get even more if other people think you provided useful answers.

To me the big sticking-point of your proposed system is the distribution of "new" forum money. How do you stop spammers and trolls signing up multiple times? If only there was a viable way to force newcomers to do "work" to get their initial allocation of forum money...

Ah, so we just make newcomers pay a few bitcoins to get started! But the burden of that might be enough to stop the idea from taking off.

If the forum has ads, that should provide a small amount of income that could buy some new bitcoins to be distributed each day. What if there was a way to identify people who had made insightful posts in OTHER places, and send the bitcoins to them so that they could participate in this forum? Poach the informative and insightful contributors, in other words.

I think that's a good point. There's not much point signing up all the charities if no-one donates to them. It's more important to have successful bitcoin donees than to have lots of them.

Because I should practice what I preach, I've just sent another 10 BTC to the EFF, and I will try to remember to keep donating regularly.

What I like about Stefan Molyneux's work is that he demonstrates that there's little if any difference between the "law of the jungle" and "morality". In the long run, the things that are in your best interest to do, are moral.

The conflict does not exist. The confusion arises because we sometimes mix up "moral" and "things that other people tell you to do, claiming that they are moral".

Haha

I don't speak on behalf of the site owner, of course, but you may want to consider the following, given that you seek a "company" with "policies".

A "company" is a limited liability structure, designed to internalise the profit but externalise the risk. And "policies" don't count for a lot. It's the actual "practice" that counts.

Well no, because Nolan didn't use the term "up-wing". But maybe the 1970s libertarians got their idea from Nolan.

Just slide it all the way to the right if you want to spend the money on that proposal. You only need to use partial slides when there are multiple competing proposals. I think.

The drop from 50 to 25 bitcoins per block is not a concern. Markets adapt just fine to this kind of thing.

Consider this: it's a decrease from 7200 to 3600 new coins per day, which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the 10,500,000 coins that will have been generated by then.

That will be quite a milestone. Half of the total number of coins will have been generated.

It occurs to me that this drop might be due to a single person who is trading on margin with MtGox. A small price drop might have forced him to quickly liquidate his coins.

In the 1970s in Australia, the libertarian party tried to introduce a two-dimensional spectrum. They described themselves as "up-wing", but couldn't get the term to catch on.

Those are interesting charts. I think the two dominant effects are the influx from the Slashdot article (when the difficulty crossed 100), and the rise of GPU mining (roughly, difficulty of 1000 and later).

This boils down to one issue: are the wage workers prevented by the force of statism from becoming the employers instead?

If the employees are freely allowed to become employers, the system is self-balancing and each person will fill the slot that suits them. There's no wage slavery if a wage worker is not stopped by force by becoming an employer instead.

Even if an individual employee is not in a position to become an employer, provided plenty of others can make the switch then it protects the other employees too, by keeping wages as high as sustainably possible.

On the other hand, if the state uses force to impose quotas, licensing, forced monopolies, registration, or even just bureaucratic overhead so high that a one-person business can't realistically cope, then it cleaves society into employees and employers and virtually guarantees the existence of wage slaves.