There's no real reason why not.

And let the precedent this sets sink in: france.com is a valuable domain name. That means any domain name in the DNS registry with any commercial value (or otherwise) can be arbitrarily seized, if the thief is sufficiently powerful that the registrar can be pressurised. Do you own a small business that competes with a large business? This sets the precedent for any powerful entity that feels threatened by your web presence to snatch "your" domain name, you only own what powerful people are willing to let you keep.



france.bit

.bit domain names are no different to your BTC, cannot be obtained by force because they're secured by cryptographic keypairs stored on a decentralised network.


The more often this happens, the more domain name holders will feel unsafe, prices will tank and people will move to decentralised domain names so that a proper capitalist system is enforced (you cannot rely on state legal systems to uphold rules written on pieces of paper). I hope the Namecoin dev waits till it gets popular, then at a crucial tipping point, enables alternative .com and .org etc domain names and people like web.com and the French gangsterment will have their domain name "assets" rendered inoperable and worthless

DANGER - I'm just about to try and qualify a "this time it's different" argument

But I think it could be different this time. Bitcoin has always had a definitive "price capitulation" event, where unusually high trade volume happens in just a few hours, the price dropping by precipitously similar proportions (like 20-40% price & volume differences). That underlines the market bottom, and a long (6-18 months) price stagnation then follows.

But the market will evemtually mature in such a way that these easily recognised/well-defined flash crash capitulations to indicate the market bottom no longer occur. It might not be this time, but eventually it will, and anyone waiting for a "capitulation event" will realise too late that the market no longer provides such an event.

Eventually, this could be the argument that kills alot of anti-Bitcoin sentiment; there are more volatile fiat currencies in the world than there are stable ones. In years gone by, USD was the desired money when your national currency got too hot to handle. It's almost self-fulfilling that this demand will slowly change to Bitcoin over time, as people only want USD because it's falling the least. Why choose something that falls when you've suddenly got the option to use a currency that's rising in value?

Sounds great, but realistically, the regulators are frequently corrupted by big players in the markets they regulate precisely to keep barriers to entry high. That's why there's so much bullshit to wade through in order to trade on the stock market; in the church of free market competition, no-one wants a truly free market because they don't really want to have real competition at all.

Let's not forget, Satoshi strongly hinted at why he created Bitcoin: this "regulated" financial system is highly corrupt. The banks in 2008 were insolvent, and central banks simply lent them all the money they needed to shore themselves up again at 0% interest. If there'd been a healthy competitive framework in place, none of that would have been necessary, as at least some substantial rivals could've helped keep the system working, albeit in a state of severe financial devastation. But the whole thing, that is every single institution, was part of the corrupt behaviour, and they all knew that each other were irredeemably bankrupt (which was the spark that set of the "credit crunch" headlines in the first place).


At the end of the day, the same thing is beginning to happen with cryptocurrency as what happened with p2p filesharing: they quietly gave up. Record companies started trying to become gig promoters instead, and the commercial music industry just became less important both financially and culturally (and music quality & diversity has arguably increased). Articles like this are the beginning of the slow acceptance that the financial industry is facing; either accept reality, or go the way the record industry did before them. On computer networks, the code is the law, get with the program

Does the transaction appear in the Armory window with 0 confirms?

If governments did what they say, I'd pay. I'd help them. But they don't, so I'm not paying them.

They can call me a criminal all they want, it's a simple case of a group of corrupt malfeasants complaining I won't give them money so that they can use it to commit immoral acts. If that makes me the bad person, then I don't want to live in "society" of people that support that anyway (the sort of people who will exasperatedly say "nothing can be done about corrupt politicians", yet I'm doing it, and they're too afraid to)



"The fearful die a thousand deaths. The brave only die once". You only get one life, choose carefully how you live it

Microsoft are in trouble long term, Windows & Office are their only profitable products overall, yet Microsoft are hell bent on alienating the userbase of both. So many casual users have switched from MS Office to Google or LibreOffice that their market leader advantage is more precarious every year. I predict big problems for just about all these tech giants (social media especially) in the long term, I suspect Google splitting into separate listed companies (meaning some are more likely to survive) was likely a foreshadowing of tech stock carnage coming within the next 10 years.

I once bought a Microsoft Windows licence; I had little choice as I was buying a budget laptop 8 years ago. It's never going to happen again.

It's simple: whoever wants capital gains tax from you must prove there was a gain. Without a paper trail, there's no evidence. Can you think of how to make sure that even if someone who sells e.g. property to you  provides Bitcoin transaction information, then there will be no way to prove the money you used was actually taxable? I can.

And there's an even simpler alternative: don't spend your money in jurisdictions where capital gains taxes exist, there are a few.

That's the beauty of proof of work, it makes more sense to compete mining than it does to war against the blockchain itself. And the more competitive mining is, the stronger Bitcoin becomes from the cumulative proof of work.

Central banks are missing out every single day that passes on the opportunity to become a significant part of a more powerful system than theirs, and every day they hold off, Bitcoin accumulates just a little more work on it's blockchain and becomes that little bit stronger. Conversely, every day that unpayable sovereign bonds become that little more unpayable, the central banking system gets slightly weaker.

Can anyone name a Microsoft product that they'd like to buy? I can't think of one

Never. They'll never get even 1 satoshi from me. Ever. Nothing.

Yep.

This is a good reason why gold and silver are somewhat losing their currency: they finally have a practical/material use in the modern industrial world. Before this era, gold and silver did have small scale use in things like teeth fillings or cutlery sets, but the bullion value was always well recognised (hence the "maid stole the silverware" meme).

Objects used as money without alternative purposes are the best money, it makes the money supply more stable (and hence predictions about the size of the money supply will be more accurate). You never have to worry about someone using Bitcoin to catalyse a chemical reaction, or to wipe their ass with.


And despite any of this, there's a good argument that Bitcoin is backed by the cumulative energy used to mine it (hence why talk of mining being wasteful or an environmental disaster is so wrong). The military force that essentially underlines the value of fiat currencies is also really just an energy backing of a sort. That puts Bitcoin in a very strong position, as fiat currency cannot rely on it's defence in the past to defend it in the present, whereas Bitcoin can (with cumulative proof of work), and it does so entirely intangibly

Yep, very much yes. Merkle tree concept has been around since the late 1970's, governments and businesses have had the opportunity to use very accountable record keeping for such a long time, and yet strangely never found that interesting.



Are you schizophrenic? Remember the opaque and unaccountable assholes from the 1st half of your post? And you're actually hanging on their every word, waiting to hear how they're going to "help" you to "clarify" the rules about your own money? Maybe I should be saying "your" money, as it seems you're one of many so-called Bitcoiners that are only a government announcement away from giving them as much as they like 

It's said that newer updates to Win7 have the data sucking tech too (don't know 1st hand, as I've not used any Windows for years now). So if you don't want Microsoft to know and share your BTC stuff, Windows 7 is out too

Turning off all Microsoft's data collection in Windows is not easy these days (this affects Win 7 & 8 as well as 10 from what I've heard). Windows is pretty much a security/privacy problem by design now. Figuring out who they're sharing your data with from the T's & C's is probably a lost cause.


OTOH, you've gotta be pretty determined if you want to start using Linux permanently. My suggestion would be to wait til you can afford a new computer, then run Linux on 1 machine and Windows on the other (there's always going to be a reason to stick with what you know while you figure out the transition).

But if you can do that, you're going to have way more control over your computer using Linux than is possible with Windows (and it's only set to get worse apparently). Just stay away from RedHat/Fedora tech (which is a Microsoft sponsored Linux company that works pretty hard to screw up Linux)

Exactly. Satoshi's anonymity protects both the person/s and the Bitcoin concept: any personal details about who was behind Bitcoin will be amplified or exaggerated to be used by Bitcoin's competition. So it's best for everyone that Satoshi left, and never returns

Yep, instant market reaction would be uncertainty about what Satoshi's reasons for coming back might be, including whether he intends to sell some coins or carry on developing etc.


But let's not forget: Satoshi wasn't infallible, he made many early mistakes which early Bitcoin devs discovered. His opinions are to be respected, but that doesn't mean he won't get things wrong.

Also, I would speculate that if Satoshi ever returns, it will not be until when Bitcoin is either totally changing the world or until after that change has finished. And that's assuming a return; if you asked me to bet, I would bet on Satoshi never returning, anonymous forever

In a way he's right (a soft fork is still a fork), but that's not what matters. People don't care about the purity of technical details, they care about the utility of the coin (and thence the capabilities that the technical details give them when using the coin). It doesn't matter if Bitcoin is a fork of it's former self, forks that are considered to improve the coin can expect to be welcomed, whereas forks that make the coin worse (such as Anonymint is suggesting) are not. The alternative is to cancel a currency's development every time a fork is required to make progress or fix a bug, and start a new coin from scratch including the new idea. That's obviously untenable.

anyway, you're making him angry now (and there's no progress, there was never any chance of a productive dialogue anyway). It should be pretty clear by now that Anonymint is simply exploiting the mechanics of the soft fork concept for the sake of a FUD based argument, and you can't do much better than demonstrating just that alone in these circumstances

Strongly supportive of this move, everything that can be done (whether at the protocol level or in the commercial arena) to decentralise mining is welcome. There hasn't been any meaningful disruption to the consolidation of the mining market up till now, hopefully this is the beginning of that trend reversing.

do you know what a futures market is