ding ding!  The poll question was probably something like "When it comes to known baby-killing terrorists, should the government track their phone and internet activity?"

bit
bit
bit - coin
bit - coin
bit - coin - er

Or they read this thread and are now changing their address regularly.

For your potential customers' security reasons, you need to tell people where you're located.  Knowing which country's laws your company is subject to is important.  Knowing that you have a physical office space in a business district as opposed to operating out of a spare bedroom is also important.

1) Where are your offices located (physical street address)
2) Where are your servers located (city/country at a minimum).

Ya - that would be up to the nature of the code change in the magical hard fork.

Even with no hard fork, the difficulty quickly increases to a point where even their super hashing speed is limited to 2016 blocks in two weeks.  The 2nd scenario I laid out above (attacker starts out mining 1 block per second) has almost reached that point.  They would be back to 2 weeks by the next difficulty increase.

Of course, what's not covered is that even after that is restored, then the attacker would still win the lottery for most or all of the blocks going forward.  So maybe the hard fork is that you can't mine if your hashrate is too far out of line with the rest of the network.  "can't mine" means that such blocks are invalidated by the rest of the network.

Actually, the factor of 4 limit means that the attacker can initially mine the crap out of coins unless there is a hard fork intervention.  But the factor of 4 takes a pretty quick toll on their advantage.

Given the loose parameters laid out previously in this thread, let's say the attacker starts in with hash power that is orders of magnitude above the rest of the network.  How long does it take the rest of the community to recognize the attack, alert developers, developers formulate plan, developers implement plan and fork code, and sufficient number of miners implement the hard fork? 2 days maybe?  So if the attackers equipment is powerful enough to mine one block in say 10 seconds at the current difficulty, then it will take 20160 seconds, or 5.6 hours to mine 2016 blocks.  After that the difficulty goes up by a factor of 4.  I haven't looked at the underlying math, so what follows is an assumption.  The assumption is that the same attacker would then need 22.4 hours to mine the next 2016 blocks.  Total time so far is 28 hours.  After that the difficulty goes up again by a factor of 4 so (using same assumption) it should take 89.6 hours for the attacker to mine the next 2016 blocks.  The hard fork would go into effect about 1/3 of the way through that.  So the attacker would mine about 5000 blocks in the 2 days required to implement a hard fork.

If we instead say the attacker can mine a block in 1 second, then the scenario does not get much worse.  The times for mining 2016 blocks for the attacker go in steps of 33.6 minutes (2016 seconds), 134.4 minutes, 8.96 hours, 35.84 hours, and 143.36 hours.  In this scenario the attacker would mine just under 8100 blocks before the hard fork could be implemented.

I know that I don't want to know for sure and am leaving this in the un-tested theory category.

mprep asked this: how do you generate the wallet address?  I saw the reply to mprep, but that was for a transaction to mprep's wallet.

fyi - 46 stars would make it pre-WWI.  Oklahoma was the 46th state in 1907.  New Mexico and Arizona were added as the 47th and 48th states in 1912.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_date_of_statehood

It wouldn't be that difficult.  Start out with a bunch of climber-bots, like monkeys.  Yes, robot-monkeys.  The robot-monkeys are programmed to climb through all of the trees looking for bird nests.  When they find nests they distract the birds and then replace any eggs with robot-bird-eggs.  The real birds won't know the difference and will look after the robot-bird-eggs until they hatch.  They'll even teach the little robot-birds how to fly.

Couldn't we just replace all birds with robot birds?  Then the Scare-C'Robot could easily get rid of them with a simple EMP blast.  Unless someone invented angry-robot-birds.  I don't know if angry-robot-birds would be vulnerable to EMP.

Oops - someone took the bag off the cat!

Seriously though - the fact that bitcoins were NOT mentioned in any of the Terminator or Back to the Future movies is a little unnerving.

Sorry - my comments were not meant to convey that we shouldn't be concerned about killing ordered by leaders just because the killing is done elsewhere.  They were meant to pragmatically point out that regardless of whether or not one thinks we need leaders, we will always have leaders.

And I agree with everything you said.

The solution with the drones, as you have inferred, is to not use them outside the context of a rare military operation that has clearly defined goals, parameters, and exit point.

As long as there are people then there will be people killing other people.

The job of leaders of state, as concerns the topic of killing, is to minimize the number of people from their country that are killed by people from other countries.

It is the nature of human kind that some people like to be in control of other people AND that some people are happy to let someone else do the heavy lifting of making the world go round.  So if the world ever evolves/descends to a state of statelessness (no borders) AND there are any people still in existence then I am afraid we will still have leaders of some type.  And one of the jobs of those leaders will be to minimize the number of their constituents that are killed by the constituents of other leaders.  Part of that will entail killing people under those other leaders.

In a pure democracy everyone votes on every group decision.  This gets impractical and unwieldy even before you get to the problems you have listed.

Does "everyone votes" mean everyone is required to vote or does it just mean everyone has the option to vote?  Does "everyone" include 4-year olds?  Those are some of the first things we'd have to vote on.

In a society with any amount of freedom and self-determination, concentrations of power (wealth) will always exist.  It is the nature of free choice that people go their own way and follow different priorities.

@dude42: That's what I had guessed was behind it.

It would definitely be nice if they would own up to this.  Their current behavior makes them seem [more?] technically incompetent as opposed to just bad business managers.  A status of "Pending Reserve Deposit" would be great - along with an option to cancel the transaction so that one could withdraw the money through another channel.

Can the client not be updated now (or soon) to handle more TPS and larger block sizes but not yet create them?  Leave this change in place until needed - 1 or 2 years.  Then when miners actually implement larger block sizes most people will already have a client that can deal with it.