It is a floating relationship.

In other words, the relationship between bitcoin and USD is not fixed, it changes or floats at the whim of those who wish to exchange between the two.

This is the same relationship status as between the USD and most currencies in the world (e.g. the yen, pound, euro, franc, AUD, CAD, ...).

Actual shipping was less than the amount billed at the time the order was placed.

Bitcoin is not pegged to USD.  "pegged to" means the relationship is fixed or at least fixed within some range.

Bitcoin is not backed by MtGox.  "backed by" means there is a guarantee or promise that bitcoin will meet the expectations spelled out in the guarantee/promise or you get compensated.  "backed by" is even stronger than "pegged to."

E.g. when the dollar was backed by gold, you could exchange your dollars for gold at a fixed price previously established.  The dollar was pegged to gold, or gold was pegged to the dollar and the dollar was backed by gold.

Currently the Chinese yuan is pegged to the U.S. dollar as are several other currencies.  The swiss franc is pegged to the Euro for the past few weeks/months.  However those are not "backed by" their peg.

Actually you can.

You just need to be hosting with a provider that can scale virtual instances like it was 2013 and not 1996.

But then again, that's only for the grownups.

In what world is a contract enforced against a non-participant?

Show me an actual case where a contract (NOT some other actionable matter) was enforced against a someone who was not a party to the contract either as a direct signatory or an agent or participant in a direct signatory.

In your contrived Jeff example, most of the time Jeff is not part of the contract violation lawsuit.  However, as you describe it, Jeff was inducing people to violate the law, which is itself illegal and could be sued on that basis.  Not for violating the contract, because Jeff didn't if he wasn't a party to it!  This is a similar principle to that which finds a pimp, or a 'Fagin' ala Oliver Twist, is violating the law even if not a party to the actual criminal act.

Oh please.

The "property right" is what is enforced, not the transfer of the right.

The contract or agreement effects the transfer and has no bearing on third parties.

The property right being transferred is an entirely separate matter for enforcement.

Evidently you have a misunderstanding of what are rights vs. civil liberties.

Rights were identified by humans, not created.

The discussion and concept of rights are co-opted by those seeking unjust power and authority, and the terminology twisted and confused as a means for obtaining that power.  If people cannot identity what are rights, and what are confusingly called civil rights instead of civil liberties, the people will be mentally and eventually physically subject to those who can obtain power thru that confusion.

"[All men] are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights..."  works just as well if you believe in a supreme intelligent creator or whether you believe in evolution thru random chance and survival of the fittest.

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

And FYI, "secure" is not "create" or "grant" or "obtain".  "Secure" in that context means to protect from violation that which one already has.  And "just powers" come only from "the consent of the governed."

And in conclusion...

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...  But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government."

Agreements are created (made).

You cannot create rights.

The only reason you approach the problem that way is because you are conditioned to think that you own ideas.  In the real world you never own ideas, because often many people have the same idea, and once an idea is exposed then everybody has the same idea.

Thus the problem does not exist today or in fictional hard-core L. world.  Or in other words, very little incentive.  The only being, "it is clear that society as a whole will be far better off if more chefs could utilize my techniques."  First off, why should society believe you?  It's called hubris, and many people have it.  It isn't a problem for society, as long as those people have no power...  So why should society give them power?

Your problem is that you really do have good ideas that will help society.  And the question is, what do you do to get your ideas out where everybody can have those same ideas?

Instead of spending 500 freaking hours (12.5 weeks at 40hrs per) to write a cookbook...

  Get free kitchen help with interns who want to learn from you.

  See the world (travel) and teach in exchange for room and board.

  Start a school for people to pay and come learn from you.

  Publish a recipe or two every now and then (like in a newspaper column or even just on your establishment's door "this is what I cooked yesterday.").

Or if you really don't care about society, just keep on moping about how if only the world were fair you could control how people use their ideas.


OK, transition to less hardcore happens here...


If society says ideas could be owned, would you charge a royalty for each time someone follows a recipe in your book?  Would you sue for damages if they followed it wrong or made some changes to it?  I hope the answer to both is, "of course not, that would be silly."

The ideas in the cookbook can never be owned, but the book itself -- layout, text, pictures, etc. can be owned similar to the compilation copyright today.  If someone were to republish a book identical or with the exact same set or even substantially the same set of recipes as yours, it would be a violation.

But if someone took just your venison recipes and other venison recipes from many other places and put them into a new "How to Cook Venison" book, such that yours make up no more than a fraction of the whole and only a fraction of yours were used, no violation.  (As they didn't just lift your pages intact!)

This is how cookbooks are treated, generally, today.  And even when not food, say, programming algorithms instead, it is how recipe books are treated.  And then you have some crass lawyers who come in after the fact and patent or otherwise claim ownership over said algorithms, and cause no end of grief for some deep pockets who happened to use them.  Even if neither the lawyers nor the deep pockets ever saw the book, or the patent, or anything else.

(BTW, I "invented" the bubble-sort as a kid in the late 1970's.  I had no idea that it had been invented long before or that it was called a bubble-sort or that it was a poor algorithm or anything like that.  It was just an obvious way to sort my list.  Similar "inventions" (also known as "ideas") happen every day, and when you are in the middle of it, it is obvious that the concept of IP ownership as practiced today is fundamentally flawed.)

Wallets get lost.  Accidents happen.  Supply is decreased.  Maybe it will be less of a problem in the future.  Maybe.

What a load...

The problem you speak of with gold mining is a "tragedy of the commons."  The land affected was public so anyone could do anything they wanted to or with it.  Regulations are then necessary to control public land to preserve its value for the public.

bitcoin mining is entirely private property.  Leave it alone.

Are you certain about that?

XAU, XAG, XPT, and XPD -- gold, silver, platinum and palladium.  The only commodities with official currency designations.  And gold and silver are almost always available wherever you get forex quotes (XAU/USD, XAG/USG).

Tony Fell, Chairman Capital Markets, Royal Bank of Canada said in Feb 2007, "At Royal Bank of Canada, we trade gold bullion off our foreign exchange desks rather than our commodity desks, because that's what it is -- a global currency, the only one that is freely tradable and unencumbered by vast quantities of sovereign debt and prior obligations."

Tax evasion is not money laundering and money laundering is not tax evasion.  Doing one does not imply the other as they are completely orthogonal concepts.  The only thing they have in common is that both are illegal and both involve money.

The plaintiffs can't just "band together to form a class action."  A class action suit must be certified by the court after the petition by lawyers to consolidate a lot of plaintiffs.  The defendant(s) are also going to have a say in the matter, and various requirements have to be met before the case(s) will be certified as a class action.

But in any case, including a class action, if it involved bitcoin it would be handled just like any (claimed) fraudulent transaction which may or may not involve or be denominated naturally in U.S. dollars.  For example, a contractor may work on a home in exchange for a car.  If the title is never turned over or is found to be fraudulent then the contractor can sue for redress.  Or if the contractor did work in exchange for a stamp collection which turned out to be counterfeit then the contractor can sue for redress.  Or if the contractor did work in exchange for gold which was never paid then the contractor can sue for redress.  Or if the contractor did work in exchange for bitcoin which was never paid then the contractor can sue for redress.  Contract (written or not) law and fraud related to it is pretty well established.  Bitcoin makes no difference.

In what way is that a risk?

Is your perception of the risk related to how many bits of precision the time is "given up" ?  For example, any computer synced with a network time server should be accurate to the second.  What about if the time stamp is only given up to the minute?  Or 5 minutes?

It sounds like you believe there is some uniquely identifiable data contained in the time.  If so, then less precision (seconds or minutes instead of nanoseconds) removes that risk.

In addition, since nobody else on the network knows how long it takes you to "give up your computer clock's time" then they have no way to correlate the value they receive to the value in your computer clock with any degree of precision.

And finally, your computer clock's time is not treated as privileged data by anything else.  Why should bitcoin treat it specially?

It was proposed that the program set the clock, and several of us said, "no, don't do that."

Another proposal, which Cdecker was confirming, was for the program to use the "network time" when the local computer time was broken.  This would be an enhancement to the 3.10 behavior of not working.

Why a server when so many are already out there?

I'd agree that we don't want bitcoin client bloat, and definitely NO WAY the bitcoin client should be setting the system time.

But maybe it is worth it in the error case for the bitcoin client to put a message in the log and attempt to use a network time instead of system time.

As for the servers out there, the bitcoin client already has http, right?  Well, most http servers now provide the date in their headers.  For example, in python:

(that output format happens to work with "date -us" if you did want to set some system time)

of course it would be better to check a couple of sites rather than relying on just yahoo to keep their http server time set properly. 

That is probably more true than you expected.

Newton's theory is not rejected.  Newtonian physics explains perfectly well what can be observed above an atomic scale, such as things we interact with every day as well as planetary orbits.

Einstein added another level of depth or precision to physics, taking us down to atomic units and predicted what was not possible to observe with the human eye.  It did not invalidate Newton.

And while gold back money may have been rejected, it was rejected by those who wanted to exploit the monetary system for their own gain.  Gold backed money prevented that exploitation.

Isn't that what you are trying to accomplish?

You cannot just arbitrarily change the meaning of words and expect to have rational discourse.

A ponzi scheme takes from the most recent joiners to give to the previous joiners.

I don't see that in any of these discussions.