I will be happy to STFU, as soon as someone explains where the flaw in my logic lies.  If this is not an actual possibility, I truly want to know.

Please enlighten me.

Banks are essentially an extension of the government.  So, I could see a government placing trust in a bank to keep/manage the government keys since they have control of the banks anyway.


You feeling good about it or agreeing to it is irrelevant.  Here's the basic way I see this happening:

1) You pay your taxes in bitcoin to whatever government you are a citizen.  The bitcoins you use to pay your taxes may be single signature or multisig, it doesn't matter.  They will accept any kind of bitcoins whatsoever.  In fact, they would prefer you sent them bitcoins that weren't multisig so that they could then "brand" them with their own signature, thereby increasing their influence over the system.

2) You file your taxes and declare how much of a tax return the government owes you.

3) The government generates a multisig transaction containing the number of coins needed to pay your tax return.

4) The government sends you one of the two signatures to that transaction along with an ID card to identify yourself when you want to spend the coins.

5) At this point, you have two options.  You can either spend the coins in a government approved transaction, or you can choose to not spend the coins ever.  The government doesn't care, because they consider your tax return paid in full, whether you like it or not.

6) If you choose to spend the coins, the government has veto-power over where and how you can spend them.  They use this veto-power to ensure that the person receiving the coins accepts them with a multisig transaction in which the government has a signature.  If the recipient refuses, the government refuses to let you spend them.  In essence, once a bitcoin is "branded", it will forever remain branded regardless of how many transactions it goes through.

This whole process does not require the government to outlaw normal single signature transactions.  Nor does it require them to create their own client that prevents normal bitcoin transactions or fork off an entirely new block-chain.  All it requires is for them to be patient.  Over time, more and more bitcoins would be branded and fall under government control.  Eventually, the vast majority of coins would be branded in this way, giving them sway over pretty much the whole network.

Now, there are both benefits and drawbacks to this.  You will have to decide whether you think the benefits outweigh the costs.  I just thought I should bring it to everyone's attention that multisig transactions open up this possibility.

The example was tongue in cheek, to illustrate the extreme case.  However, the concern is real.

If you allow multi-signature transactions in the blockchain, that essentially means that all parties must agree to spend the coins in that transaction.  If one party has more military authority than the others, in that they can impose their will on the other parties without ramification, a problem potentially arises.  This is especially true if that party is willing to just let those coins rot in the block-chain forever.  The government wouldn't be the slightest bit concerned if you can't spend your money.  All they would be concerned about is whether they are exerting control.


It is not a matter of people giving up their responsibilities.  I'm not talking about you giving the government one of your signatures.  What I am saying is that when the government first gives you payment, that payment will be delivered with the government first generating two signatures, and then giving you one of them.  After all, they are the ones starting out with the bitcoins, so they hold all the cards.  Your only option is to refuse payment.  But, government employees and business that serve the government don't really have that option.  It is not reasonable to expect that even a significant fraction of people working for the government would refuse payment.  And, even if they did, there would be plenty more stepping in to take their place.

If a government has the capability to exert control, and has the need to do so, it will exert control.  Once a government has their hooks in one multisig transaction, they can refuse to allow coins to be spent unless they have hooks in the subsequent transactions as well.  Bitcoin without multisig capabilities does not give governments this hook.  Bitcoin with multisig does.  Whether you see this as a problem or not, is purely up to you.  However, I believe that this goes against the original spirit of bitcoin.

I have been pondering over the ramifications concerning multi-signature transactions in bitcoin. While there are some very useful capabilities that can be enabled with this feature, I am concerned that there are some highly undesirable potential consequences as well.  Please convince me that I am just being paranoid, and that these fears are unjustified.

Suppose all of our grandest dreams are realized, and bitcoin has become a world-wide currency.  You buy gas with it, you purchase your groceries with it, and you pay your taxes with it.  There are no central banks, inflation is a thing of the past, and bitcoin has been declared a world-wide legal tender.

Unfortunately, not all members of the U.S. government are happy about their loss of control over the world's finances that bitcoin brought about.  Consequently, they pass a law that all payments made by the U.S. government must send to addresses set up with multi-signature transactions.  The receiver of the bitcoin payments retains one signature, but the U.S. government retains the other.  The law is sold to the public as a security measure.  After all, if a thief steals a person's bitcoin wallet, the thief cannot spend the coins without first getting approval from the U.S. government.  Of course, this requires that the valid owner of the bitcoins must have some form of government ID, similar to a credit card, to identify himself when he tries to spend his bitcoins so the U.S. government can validate the transaction as authentic.

The receiver has no choice but to accept payment in this way, because bitcoins have been declared legal tender, so it is illegal to refuse bitcoins as payment.  Having to identify oneself to spend bitcoins is somewhat annoying.  However, the added security is worth it to most people.

Several years pass, during which the U.S. government convinces other governments to adopt the same policy and form an alliance.  Collectively, they form the World Transaction Federation, or WTF.  After the vast majority of countries have adopted this practice, the U.S. government decides that security can be tightened even further and gets all of the WTF members to sign a treaty stating that bitcoins signed by WTF members can only be spent to receiving addresses similarly signed by WTF members.

Several more years pass, and the world-wide bitcoin economy keeps chugging along, with a greater and greater percentage of the total bitcoin supply falling under WTF control.  Finally, after the WTF controls 99.9% of all bitcoin currency, the WTF collectively decides that the world economy would greatly benefit if the WTF could control the supply of money directly, rather than having to perform its work in the straightjacket of bitcoin.  Consequently, they pass a law that states that no WTF member can sign any bitcoin transaction, except those that exchange bitcoins for some lovely freshly printed bank notes.  Not to fear, though.  The notes are backed in value by gold.  So there is nothing to worry about...

Exactly right.  Except, oddly, you seem to be missing the point.

The problem with the central bank is not that it has a lot of money.  The problem, fundamentally, is that it can create as much money as it wants ad-infinitim.  It uses this power to continually maintain and increase its influence over society.  It is now to the point that virtually all people in the U.S. are essentially indentured servants to the banks.  The system is set up so that the indentured servants collectively owe more than they can possibly pay back.  In theory, the amount of money equals the total amount of debt.  But, due to interest the servants contractually owe the bank on the money they borrow, the entire money supply does not equal the amount of money the servants must pay back.  So, on a continual basis, the central bank issues more money, gets the servants to borrow that at interest to pay back the previous debts, and the servitude continues.

The early adopters of bitcoin have the potential to become very wealthy.  That is true.  However, they do not have the power to continually create more money.  The bitcoins they mined early on are the bulk of the bitcoins they will ever have.  Thus, they do not have the ability to continually keep the rest of us as their servants.  Once they spend their bitcoins, however much they are worth, then they will have exhausted whatever power they have.

This is awesome!

The easter-egg idea is inspired as well.

Unfortunately, the easter-egg idea, while great from a promotional standpoint, doesn't put bitcoins into the hands of very many people.

I think the best way to convince people of the power of bitcoin is to let them play with it, like the old bitcoin faucet did.  The bitcoin faucet failed primarily because it was too easy for jerks to automate requests for bitcoins and suck the faucet dry.  But, if you are actually charging people money for a product, and give them a small amount of BTC as an added bonus, you shouldn't have to worry too much about chargebacks.  You can make the monetary value of the BTC to be small enough that it wouldn't be worth the hassle of actually ordering a subscription just to grab the bitcoins. Rather, their only real worth would be the entertainment value of trying out something new and different.

As such, I think it would be really cool if every magazine subscription was associated with a unique private key from which a person could claim a small amount of bitcoins, say ฿0.01 every month.  For example, you could generate a private key from the subsciber's name and address.  Or, you could print a QR code with a private key on the address label.  Alternately, you might find it easier to have them log into the magazine's website with their subscription ID, and have the site send them some BTC directly.

The site looks great!  I wasn't even aware it existed.  You are now bookmarked

Since you've been online since November, I assume there are entries older than just a few days.  It would be nice to have a link to browse older articles.  (If it's already there, I didn't see it.)

That's right, although if it were exactly $5 I probably wouldn't be nearly as motivated to ask for change in bitcoins as if it were $4.98.  It's having to contend with that fistful of loose change that really bugs me.

Unfortunately, based on the responses so far, I'm guessing that the capability does not yet exist in the bitcoin universe.

Rather than end up with a pocketful of coins after giving my local merchant a $20 bill for a sandwich, I'd prefer he scanned a QR code of a bitcoin address from my smartphone and have the equivalent amount of bitcoins sent to that address.

Not only would this have the benefit of eliminating the jar full of coins sitting on my dresser next to my bed, it would also provide an easy way for the general public to obtain their first bitcoins.  Further, this kind of service would not expose the merchant to any more risk, since he is already accepting cash for his goods. I would even be willing to pay a modest fee for the convenience.

Are there any bitcoin POS services, such as bitpay, out there that offer this capability?  If not, would this be difficult to add?

Whew!  That had me worried there for a minute.

Thanks.

Does anyone have an explanation for this?

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

My account is still locked as well.

Of course it's a mountain.  I even found an old picture of it in my attic:

Your bitcoin client is probably "stuck" because it is having difficulty connecting to the IRC channel where it finds other clients it can connect to in the network.  There has been so much interest in bitcoin lately that it can take an hour or more to establish some solid connections, and then another couple of hours to download blocks.  So, I would recommend you just be patient.

I would avoid challenging the Senator to campaign for Bitcoin's destruction, as you do at the end of your letter.  That seems a tad too defiant, and I don't think that is the idea you want to convey.  Instead, I would simply implore him to treat the Silk Road and Bitcoin as two entirely separate issues, and to judge each independently.

Further, I would recommend that instead of sending this off as the letter of an individual, change all references of "I" into "We", and allow members of this community to join you in a petition by adding their names to it.  A forceful statement from the larger community would be far more powerful, in my opinion.  I realize that there are many people in this community that would not be willing to sign such a petition, but I'm sure there are a number of us that would.

That motto is my new favorite.  I love double meanings, and both interpretations fit bitcoin perfectly.

Personally, I think that "In math we trust" would be better than "In cryptography we trust", since more people would understand that.

However, I think the whole "In xxx we trust" is a bad idea from a PR perspective, since whatever the xxx, it is obviously replacing "God".  That will leave a bad taste in the mouths of very many people.  Many fundamentalists would probably end up swearing off bitcoin for no other reason.

There was actually a discussion about creating a bitcoin motto a while back in a very similar thread to this one:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6455.20

My favorite suggestion from that thread is:

Iunctum in Divortium (Unity in Division)

I think one other issue that needs to be considered is how the bitcoin symbol would look when expressing values far smaller than 1 BTC.  I know it hasn't been absolutely established yet that BTC will use SI units, but I think it is highly likely that we will end up using the convention of 0.001 BTC = 1 milli-bitcoin and 0.000001 BTC = 1 micro-bitcoin.  If that's the case, then we will probably end up using "m" for milli and "μ" for micro.

When you set the various symbols next to these prefixes, they look like this:

0.001 ฿ = 1 m฿ = 1000 μ฿
0.001 Ⓑ = 1 mⒷ = 1000 μⒷ
0.001 ⓑ = 1 mⓑ = 1000 μⓑ
0.001 Ƀ = 1 mɃ = 1000 μɃ
0.001 ¤ = 1 m¤ = 1000 μ¤
0.001 β = 1 mβ = 1000 μβ

To me, the Ⓑ and ⓑ symbols look very awkward in these cases, whereas the others are more aesthetically pleasing.  My personal preference is for the ฿ symbol, since it looks like money.  Since that's being used as the Bhat currency symbol already, though, my second choice would be for the β, since it has a nice visual flow when combined with the milli and micro prefixes.

I would take one look at the mothership and start drooling.

Then, I would steal one of their shuttles, and, as nonchalantly as possible fly it up to the mothership and dock.  Then, I would tie my laptop into the shuttle's I/O port, hack into the mothership's mainframe, upload the bitcoin miner, and point its output to my own wallet address.  Finally, in my best Mr. Spock voice I would say, "Computer: This is a Class 'A' Priority directive.  Compute to the last bitcoin the value of 21 million."

At that point, I would high-tail it out of there, as the bitcoin client takes over bank after bank of the mothership's mainframe, vomiting bitcoins at my wallet, forcing the mothership to lose all control and plummet into the Pacific.

Then I would dare all those whiners and nay-sayers to claim I didn't earn my bitcoins.

I like using the slang of "millies" and "mikes" for the more formal "millibits" and "microbits", respectively.

These names are very easy to remember, for those of us that understand that 1 milli = 1e-3 and 1 micro = 1e-6.  Certainly almost everyone on this forum is going to intuitively grok that nomenclature.  It also gives me the mental picture of a bill with a face printed on it, in the same way that the term "Benjamin" refers to a $100 bill.

[Edited]Also, it appears that we already have general consensus that 0.00000001 BTC = 1 satoshi.