Huh. I kind of like that. ... A lot. Trying to stop Bitcoin is like trying to stop gunpowder.

That's why you get credit cards, dude - for emergencies. 

Difficulty won't go down. Growth might slow down in a few months. No argument from me on centralization. "Greenness" is contentious (and I doubt Bitcoin ever had a million unique miners going at once - maybe 50K), though with the current situation, almost all the network's costs are upfront in hardware, where electricity cost isn't significant (thus, it's extremely "green"), but this will change - hashpower on the network will eventually again be determined by electricity costs and BTC price (instead of how quickly ASIC manufacturers lower their prices) - there's a ton of energy spent with conventional payment methods (printing cards, literally tons of paper, B&M branches + loads of employees, computing power processing transactions). Between Bitcoin's storage, bandwidth, and actual mining energy costs - it's hard to determine what Bitcoin's overall energy consumption will be when/if it scales to a point where it's comparable with a conventional financial institution. You can kind of forecast it now, but it couldn't be very accurate given the current technological changes in mining hardware and all the other variables which can become huge when you're doing 1/500,000 the volume of, say, VISA.

Yes.

Hello, I'd like to buy the car, taking advantage of the free shipping offer for paying in BTC.

I'm in the US. Address?

It can prove, with 70% certainty (well above the minimum threshold of 50%), that somebody is White, which eventually brings us to a 20% certainty that the person is a US citizen - as a separate addition to usual routines, making it almost impossible (90% certain) that an English-speaking Christian will be targeted.

Healthiest thing to do is to swallow your emotions. It'll cause a pain in your gut the first few times because your body doesn't want to swallow your emotions, so just go ahead and swallow that, too. You'll eventually develop a kind of emotional tolerance where you stop feeling, which is when you'll want to find a reputable cocaine dealer. Some people go ahead and get the cocaine first -- big mistake.

Are you White? Good news - I just talked to my supervisor, and we're going to purge all Caucasians from our databases so we can better-target the real terrorists. -But, the software won't know you're White unless you suggest it - so at least fill out the "language spoken" and "religion" poll. For your own good. Thanks!

Interesting. The feather fork works both ways, though it'd probably still be very, very expensive to try competing. I mean - once you establish 90%+ of total hashrate and are paying, say, 150% PPS and still making a profit, I'm not sure there's any way to compete other than by trying to appeal to users' sense of morality (in which case, they'd just use p2pool - though by force-orphaning their blocks, I don't think there'd be many willing to send that much BTC into a black hole). If Satosh mining falls below a certain threshold (maybe 80% of total hashrate), the whole thing starts falling apart, unless Satosh makes PPS payments to pools to maintain their support and has reserve funds to boost incentive.

Actually... that'd be interesting... meta-pools. So as far as ranks go... miners=barons, pool ops = dukes, meta-pool ops = kings. Then you just need an emperor. Peasants would be all users without "land" (hashpower), who aren't entitled to vote.

I wonder if there's a parallel universe where governments run pools (private pools would be criminalized), and collect taxes in the form of mining fees. When they go to war, an equivalent to the US Army's Cyber Command removes foreign citizens, governments, and corporations from the USG's whitelist. If BTC were the global currency, this would near-immediately isolate the country economically, on top of whatever "terrorists" the world governments already prevent from using BTC.

The IMF would set global inflation rates by forking BTC. Since they have all "legal" users' compliance, they could increase or decrease supply at will. Maybe a true world government isn't far off. Ooo - my imagination's going, I think I'm ready to start outlining that dystopian book series, now.

Not that day, but depending on how desperate the situation is, you may get another job for a while. Inflation is slow and somewhat predictable. It's safe to assume you're going to lose a compounding 2-6% of your wealth per year if all your savings are USD stuffed under the mattress. You have strong incentive to fight that, because you could easily be losing more per year than you earn when close to retirement - so you invest (in a scenario where there is no inflation, maybe you would think it better to take the "sure thing" and just ignore investing altogether). There's also strong incentive to take out larger loans than usually considered reasonable, which means you'll have to work more hours to pay on.

US real GDP per capita per hour worked - the metric I think is pretty darn good at indicating fundamental ability to achieve a high quality of living - has been steadily increasing, even in and beyond 2008 - it's been like this for decades. The US is ultimately becoming increasingly economically efficient, even when our common sense is telling us stimulus funding subsidizes "bad" work. Maybe it is - maybe it's just the technological revolution and globalization which is pushing us forward. By this metric, the US is comparable to the "quality of living" increase in most European countries (even those with some form of crisis). We're way, way behind growth rates in places like Turkey (which I don't believe received or contributed to any type of bank bailout) and China, but our actual rates compared to Eastern countries are ~3x-5x higher, still.

One other metric worth looking at in relation to this question - in the US, mean hourly wage is right around $22. Meanwhile, by RealGDP/hoursworked/population, our "real" wage (after investments and everything else reported) is right around $40/hr, so the US is very reliant on investing (whether due to inflation or something else) to achieve a high standard of living, but it does seem to work (at least, so far). This is all gross oversimplification, though, and lots of assumptions. I don't think it can be confidently said one way or the other whether inflation is "good," though morality arguments are easy.

Trust system isn't moderated. You can resolve it with him, or try getting those who pos-repped him to revoke it.

Yes, it started decreasing in rates toward the end, IIRC - it did sometimes touch 150% PPS, but it varied based on how much hashpower was being leased by others and at what rate (assuming all this leasing stuff actually happened and Pirate wasn't laundering, or just being a weirdo cokehead).

(OT - better split the thread, again!)
Of course you can trust a 0-conf transaction for something like coffee. You can check against most obvious double-spends with software which quickly checks mining queue and blockchain for doublespends, which already exists and is implemented by most services accepting no or few confs. $x coffee, however, is much different than the $xxx-$xxxx transactions you can use personal checks for, which are much easier to defraud with.

The fork relied on miners (really, pool ops). It's kind of a cool thought experiment, I think. Take mining subsidies, or ignore them? Will the ASIC mining corporations really ignore the money being waved in their faces if it's sold as protecting the network from "harmful" elements?

The Foundation, I don't think has much more influence than those individuals would have in the IRC rooms where the fork was negotiated. There's only a handful of people controlling the majority of hashpower, whether they're corporate miners or pool ops. p2pool helps fight this, but not if those miners decide to switch to mining pools which pay out "115% PPS" like we had back in the Pirate days. I mean - if you didn't mine on GPUMax back then, it was assumed you were either too poor to have the required hashpower for acceptance, too un-connected to get a pass-through account, or just stupid.

Most Bitcoin exchange transactions use USD. ~70%. Ironically, US customers have been pushed out of most Bitcoin exchanges (both currency and securities) and casinos.

Plenty of people care about BTC price, so plenty of people care about USD. It's changing. BTCChina recently posted 24h volume comparable to Gox, and the 30D CNY/RMB chunk being 13% of all is a pretty huge leap forward, so now there's another area to look at. The Euro, though, even though I know there's a lot of European Bitcoin support, and "super-pockets" of support in some areas like Berlin, and I transact frequently with those in Europe - it has only a tiny sliver of exchange transaction volume, less than 2x that of JPY. Maybe they're more prone to exchange locally, or mine and hold, or buy with gold - but you can't really shake the perception of irrelevance which comes from those charts without a dramatic spike in BTC/EUR activity.

There are other reasons, too. For example, the USG is very aggressive in enforcing its own laws internationally, aggressive in demanding extradition, and seems to think it owns the Internet - so its laws (current and future) can be worth getting familiar with and tracking.

Feather-forking - Satosh much cheaper to inject than previously thought. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=312668

Big Money James could inject the Satosh today. 

Yes.

ETA: Story is.... allegedly... confirmed. "UPDATE: Chase Bank confirmed to Infowars that all business account holders were being subjected to these new regulations. Given that even a relatively small grocery store or restaurant is likely to turnover more than $50k a month in cash payments, this appears to be part of a wider move to shut down businesses who mainly deal in cash. Chase told us customers would have to upgrade to much more expensive accounts to avoid the capital controls, meaning larger corporations will not be affected. The bottom line is that banks think your money is their money and will do everything in their power to prevent you from withdrawing it in large quantities."

Sorry bro, but nobody cares about broke folk.

It's missing a period, too. -And a cold-ass lil comma.