99% of the population don't have the skills or understanding to generate and use a GPG key.

And those are people who know more about money than the average Joe.

It just shows how difficult it is to introduce a new concept. Advertising agencies know this, of course, and design their campaigns carefully to convey new ideas to potential future buyers.

Steve Jobs knows it too. Watch one of his product presentations and you'll be in no doubt as to the intended purpose of the product.

Never underestimate how difficult it is to communicate a new idea, and how much effort it will take to do so.

Of course, in a few years time when people look back they will wonder with amazement why such an "obvious" idea was so hard to explain.

Some scammers wouldn't know about the 30 day limit in advance, or wouldn't understand its ramifications.

Others are just looking for a way to "test out" whether a stolen PayPal ID works, before using it for a bigger fraud.

The problem isn't occurring on MtGox's side of things, it's occurring on PayPal's.

The scammer gains access to a PayPal account that isn't theirs, then uses the PayPal funds to buy Bitcoins. If the scammer can withdraw the bitcoins before the owner of the PayPal account finds out and gets PayPal to reverse the transaction, the scammer has won.

Even if the legitimate owner of the PayPal account has a perfect reputation, PayPal is still going to reverse the transaction if someone else uses that account fraudulently.

If someone offered insurance to cover this, it wouldn't work. The honest user would never buy the insurance, because they know their PayPal payment will be good. The scammer would always buy the insurance, because they know there is a high risk of PayPal reversing the transaction. The insurance company would go out of business.

On the other hand, a valid and viable insurance model would be to allow people to pay a premium to cover the risk of losing their MtGox balance if MtGox went out of business in the 30 days after an exchange is carried out and before the bitcoins can be withdrawn. I wonder what the market rate would be for that, per month?

No of course the quantity doesn't change, but the utility of a commodity might change according to how divisible it is. Personally I don't think it's an issue for bitcoins.

I think the price movement is solely due to the Bitcoin article which is still on the front page of www.fsdaily.com

This created a small extra demand at MtGox, plus a bigger extra demand from existing Bitcoin users who speculated by buying some extra coins before the fsdaily users arrived.

If, at the date of the 100,000th block, MtGox prices each bitcoin at $35, will you still sell your 10,000 BTC for $6,000 instead of the $350,000 that you would get at MtGox?

If you don't already have them, how would you get them at that price? And if you do already have them, would you be willing to vest them with a trusted third party in the meantime?

Bitcoin futures are much trickier than currency futures, because there's no easy way to hedge.

Whenever consumer organizations do a test mailing in the UK, they find that about 1% of correctly addressed letters don't get delivered. So cut bitcoin2cash some slack if yours doesn't make it.

In the United Kingdom they simply skipped the "controversy" bit.

The Bank of England keeps claiming that it is committed to monetary policy that will deliver 2% inflation (as if that isn't too much already!) while having delivered higher than that for 16 consecutive months now.

Do you still think 21 million bitcoins will be enough?

(Actually I think of it as 2.1 quadrillion nanocoins or whatever we decide to call the smallest divisible part of a bitcoin.)

It's not often I've seen a YouTube video where the vast majority of ratings are "thumbs down".

True goal of satoshi is to get people to speculate what true goal of satoshi is.

Seriously, some people might find it fun to speculate but it's not relevant to anything. The code is open source and we know that (with one exception) there is nothing in there that treats satoshi differently from anyone else. The one exception is that only satoshi can sign the "update available" message for the standard client, but that's no big deal.

So everyone should just look at whether bitcoin works for them, and not worry about how it works for anyone else.

I don't think satoshi has any kind of evil plan, because evil people have much easier ways to get what they want than to do something that's an intellectual master feat. And even if satoshi was evil personified, it wouldn't make any difference. It's the protocol you need to look at, not the personalities.

Well, for example, there is a "simple living" movement in the US, where people restructure their lives so that they are free of federal income tax:

"Resist Federal Income Taxes Legally"
http://w4resistance.org/lowerincome.html

I'll start the ball rolling. I'll buy at $7 per 100 coins (up to 2000 coins).

Hopefully there is someone who is able to improve on that offer, as it's for a good cause.

A quick Google search returned these PayPal statistics, in case they're of interest to anyone:

• Over 2 million transactions per day (that's about 14000 per 10 minutes)
• 150 million accounts in 190 countries
• Over $150 million in payments per day

Of course, any system that works well for micropayments could end up handling many more transactions but a much lower dollar equivalent.

If the authorities kill YouTube, the masses will rebel.

Research shows that, once you have enough money to live on, the chance to gain extra money is a strong motivator for non-creative tasks, but is actually a demotivator for creative tasks.

Details in this video presentation are easy to follow:

"Drive - The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

The simplest way to determine the outcome is to automate it completely.

The funds are frozen until one outcome is chosen by people who represent 50% or more of the betting stake. At that point, everything is paid out to those who favored the chosen outcome.

It's in no-one's interest for the funds to be tied up forever, so the participants will find a way to get 50% support for one outcome or the other.

All the organisers need to do is to run the website, not to get involved in controversies.

Just install the Bitcoin client on the other computer and get a Receiving Address from it. On the original computer, click "Send coins" and paste that receiving address.



Nothing is lost. You are only "out of action" for the time you are not generating. As soon as you start generating again, you have as much chance of generating a block as you would have had if you didn't shut down.

If you want to play with Bitcoins and haven't generated any yet, just pick up (for free) 0.05 bitcoins from the Bitcoin Faucet:
http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

Even if we think it is always best to use an open source client, there are still circumstances when the MIT license would be a valid choice.

One of the characteristics of the MIT license is that it is compatible with most other licenses. That way, you can write a new client which combines the MIT-licensed code with code that is under some other kind of license.

Perhaps this will enable someone to write an open source client that combines parts of the existing implementation with existing GUI libraries, database frameworks, logging utilities, etc etc.

The flexibility of the MIT license is a big help if you want to encourage the adoption of niche software.