No, there must not exist universal positive rights since they violate the principle of self-ownership. And the only way to ignore the principle of self-ownership without creating an ethical code completely incoherent to the human nature is to establish a society where some own others. That's normally considered unethical by definition. Try reading this: http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe11.html

And this (positive natural rights) is completely contradictory to the meaning of economic exchanges. An economic exchange is something done voluntarily. If you force me to do something, that's definitely not an economic exchange. (once a philosopher defined it as "political exchange" I don't remember his name) 


Only if it's voluntary. Otherwise it's probably theft if not worse.


Society itself. That's the value of stuff. What people are willing to give for it. For it to happen, all exchanges must be voluntary.

Galuel,

I read the wikipedia article. (I jumped the math part).

Not only there are some wrong economic ideas, but mainly, the ethical principals it bases on are very wrong.

You start from the idea that there is such a thing as an universal positive right. This is a denial of human self-ownership. Positive rights are only fair if acquired by voluntary contracts. A universal positive right means someone should be forced to give you something simply for the reason that you exist. This is servitude, partial slavery. It's unethical.

About "rémunérer tout le travail non marchand", this is an ethical absurd that derives from the false premise of universal positive rights.
If somebody decided to perform a work that absolutely nobody is willing to pay for, s/he should not earn anything for it. Will to pay for something means you are willing to exchange part of your work for this something. If you do something nobody is willing to exchange their work for, they should under no conditions be forced to. That's a form of slavery, and from the economical point of view, it's clearly a waste of resources. It's a form of subsidy, and like all subsidies, it destroys wealth.
And by the way, the examples of "travail non marchant" given on the page are bad ones. Most of, if not all those activities can be remunerated voluntarily. Some will not be remunerated as well as highly demanded jobs, but this is perfectly reasonable and fair. You should be remunerated proportionally to what you give to society.

Sorry if I sounded rude, but it seems that you understand well some stuff, like the fact that the current monetary system is crap and causes economic cycles, but by starting from wrong ethical principals you may derive some dangerous absurds.

Anyway, the only fair/ethical monetary system - which, as usual, happens to be the best economic solution - is a free one, where everybody is free to choose whatever they want to use as exchange means. If you agree with that, it's fine, people that agree to use this constantly inflationary currency would agree in given part of their savings to others. I see no problem in that.
But if you wish to force that through state law, and that was the impression I got from the wikipedia page, then, well, we have a really strong disagreement there.

Regards

These solutions of one transferring money to oneself... ok, currently most transactions are not taxed, but one day they might be, right?
Relying on a solution for anonymity that requires money to be spent worries me a bit.... (not that I have a better solution, though  )

Sorry, but I think it's not quite that...

You could, in theory, have fractional reserves of bitcoins, as with dollars. Banks don't create dollars (FDR notes) out of thin air, they create bank account balance out of thin air, and that's is counted as actual dollars in the economy.

Suppose some bank stores bitcoins. People would transfer their bitcoins to the bank and would have an account balance, that they could retrieve when needed. The bank could then lend part of this money without blocking your balance, thus creating fractional reserves.

Of course that, as I said before, there is not much interest in this, because you don't really need to pay for somebody else just to store your bitcoins. You can do it yourself, easily and safe.

So, although in theory it would be possible, in practice it might never happen.


Nothing has inherent value. 

Value is subjective, people give value to stuff, it's not part of stuff.
That's why you can not claim that someone that built an ugly building beside your house damaged your property by reducing its value, for example. The value of your house is not an inherent attribute of it.

It's not nonsense.

Item 2 is definitely the most important.

Fractional reserves are not that horrifying when alone, it's true.
But Bitcoins may also bring an end to fractional reserves since nobody would need to pay somebody else to protect/keep their money.
It's only the union of "vault" services with "landing" services that allowed banks to create such fractional reserves.

And monetary inflation is whatever that adds new money. Gold mining is monetary inflation if people use gold as money.

From your own link:

"The term also describes financial products, such as currency or stock and bond indexes."

It doesn't look that impossible to me.
This definition of yours by the way doesn't even make much sense, since the utility of something is entirely subjective.


How can you make such a statement? How can you know which is the utility of bitcoins for other people? This is subjective.

And, anyway, it isn't the definition of commodity either.

But the dollar is a commodity.
And, by the way, what backs gold?

My first draft is attached, but it surely has issues (masculine/feminine, plural/singular, the placing of the & etc). Is there a way I could test the program with this translation in order to correct stuff?

I'm translating the po file to Brazilian Portuguese.

So bitcoins are even harder money than gold is. They verify all conditions, and even better than gold. It's harder to fake, will become impossible to produce after reaching the 21 million limit, and it's more divisible.

This is indeed a good solution. Solves more than one problem actually.

I think so.
Actually, that's the very idea of a free currency market. If for some reason another system beats bitcoins, well, that's competition! That's not "bad consequences".

The only important thing to mind is avoiding non-bitcoins to be mistaken by "true bitcoins". This is important. And I think this is very well protected by the algorithm itself.

+1

This shocked me actually. The poor guy didn't do anything stupid.

Automatic backups are really important after knowing that. And while that cannot be implemented, I think a sort of information message explained this in short words should be displayed every time someone sends coins. A popup saying something like, if I have T coins and I send S coins:
"S coins where sent to address X.
(T-S) coins where sent to address Y, which belongs to you, in order to improve privacy. Please, realize that old backups you might have of your wallet will now be useless. You should make a new one."

This simple message would have avoided this awful lost. (of course, you may also add a "Don't display this again" check box)

Regards

What's the definition of "hard money" ?
It's not "physical", otherwise printed dollars would be called so.

Bitcoins are a commodity, and can be compared to gold. Actually, it's even better, since one day the monetary base will freeze. Gold natural reserves won't run out so soon.

RSS by language would also be nice!

I wouldn't try to explain how cryptography works.

Hello,

Isn't there an easy way to split or merge different wallets?

I know I could transfer to myself, but that's laborious, and, well, there are the transaction fees somebody just pointed me in another topic.

Merging might be useful for someone that intends to use more than one computer to mint for bitcoins.

Splitting could be useful in order to protect your bitcoins. If you keep all of them in the same wallet and an attacker has access to it, he gets all your money! If you had split it and backed up your coins in different medias that are not connected to the internet, that reduces the risk.

Talking about protection, is built-in password protection for your wallet planned to be developed for the default client? It could be helpful too.

Thank you.

Interesting, I hadn't yet read about this transaction fee.
Thank you for the quick reply!

So, according to the wiki page, this transaction fee is already in practice! I should not transfer money to myself in order to merge wallets then...

I'll open a topic on that matter.

Hello,

I'm also a newbie to bitcoin. I got to know it only two days ago.

As a libertarian software engineer, I loved the idea!

Concerning the minting of new coins, can anyone confirm if I got it right?

• Everyone generating coins is trying to guess which is the next hash for the next block, basically, a p2p brute force effort.
• The lucky one that finds the next block, gets the coin prize for it.
• The block prize is currently 50 coins, and it will decrease by half at each 210.000 block interval
• The more blocks there are, the safer the system is against fraud in what concerns double spending
• There is an arbitrary limit of 21 million coins (it looks small for a monetary base... most currencies' M1 are around hundreds of billions, aren't them? If bitcoin succeeds, most mundane prices would be just fractions of a bitcoin )
• There is no limit to the number of blocks

Is everything right?

If that's so, I wonder what would be the incentive for someone to keep producing blocks once the limit of 21 million code is reached. Wouldn't the number of block risk to stagnate? Wouldn't that represent a threat?

Thank you.

My sincere congratulations for those who started this system. Really nice work! (just to say I helped a tiny bit, I translated the getting_started wiki page to Brazilian Portuguese... if you have an internationalization file for the FAQ, send it to me, when I have some time I might translate it)