It might even be better for MtGox to stay big. Presumably they will then be paying a lot of tax to the Japanese govt, who might resist demands from others to shut them down.

This is another very interesting offer! But one thing doesn't seem quite right...
If you make the buy-back price 200% of face value, there will be no need for people to trust that you will not buy back the bonds just in advance of a default.

Your provision regarding "substantiated suspicion" sounds reasonable, but it won't feel very satisfactory to the few outliers who are convinced the default is about to happen then lose their bonds for 160%. At 200%, no-one can complain.

Why not send a few Satoshis to that address to see whether it really is being emptied out automatically, or whether something else is happening.

While we're considering related questions:

Is there any consciousness in a human egg or sperm cell? What about the moment after the sperm penetrates the cell wall of the egg? If so, how does consciousness come into existence at that point? If not, at what point does the new human become conscious?

For sure. But here's a question with a slightly less obvious answer:

After a caterpillar spins its cocoon, all of its body dissolves into what is essentially a soup of organic molecules, which reassemble themselves into a moth or a butterfly. Assuming the caterpillar was conscious, and that the moth or butterfly is conscious, is it the same consciousness or a different one?

I think this claim originates from a simplistic analysis that assumes miners are selling all new coins immediately.

On that basis, 7200 new coins are coming onto the market every day. If the price remains stable around $5, there must also be $36000 of new additional coming into the Bitcoin exchanges each day (equal to 7200 x $5).

If the supply of new coins drops to 3600 per day, but the influx of new money stays at $36000 per day, the market price will rise to $10.

Obviously there are many factors that are not considered in that naiive analysis, so it's not of much use.

It's a form letter that went out to millions of people.

Assuming your new client has downloaded all of the block chain, this probably means you sent the old balance, then quit the old client before it had a chance to communicate the transaction to the network. Maybe it had no peers at the time.

Make sure you have a backup of your wallets, then start up the bad sys HD and fire up the old client again until you have some connections and the transaction gets sent. Alternatively/additionally, start off the bad sys HD and take a copy of the wallet.dat file from it.

Why would you expect matter and energy to congregate into "our" perception, instead of into new perceptions belonging to the new configurations of matter and energy?

Postgres and Oracle scale to the commercial needs of large organizations, and large government departments. But they don't scale to the needs of, say, a search engine. Sure, you could implement Google's index of the WWW using Postgres or Oracle, but not at a reasonable cost because a relational database makes much heavier demands on the hardware.

Virtually all NoSQL users would acknowledge that SQL would be preferable, if it weren't for price and performance considerations.

I doubt they will issue a MintChip not linked to any banking institute, but we shall have to see.

I don't see any evidence that they ever intended it to be anonymous or even pseudo-anonymous. The official docs say that "no personal data is exchanged in the transaction", but that means the transaction between the buyer and the merchant. The block diagrams show that the chip's value is loaded from and redeemed to a linked bank account.

So the merchant may not know who you are, but the "trusted agent" surely does, and by extension you are not anonymous to the Mint and the Govt.

It's not like the card needs to hold the whole block chain. A 2GB microSD card can hold plenty of transaction data. Most transactions probably only do a few hops before they make their way back to the "trusted issuer".

I'm not saying this is how they would do it. I'm just saying that there are ways they could do it, and I don't think they're so stupid as to release a system that can be hacked to allow infinite double-spends.

Maybe they don't even allow re-spends? Maybe you can only spend the money you got loaded onto the card from your bank account, and that money can only be redeemed by you or the person you directly spend it to (unless you go online so that the trusted issuer can validate your balance).

In other words: Canadian Mint -> Trusted Issuer -> You -> Coffee Shop -> Trusted Issuer

When you cook, the temperature is usually regulated by water evaporating from the food. If you pump all the cooktop's energy into a heatsink, it's likely to get red hot and damage the vitreoceramic cooktop. If you had fans that were big enough and reliable enough I suppose you could make it work.

Plus, it's an expensive way to get heating that is no more efficient than the simple resistive heating of a $30 fan heater.

I bought some jewellry from BitMit.net

I never expected to be buying things like that with bitcoins, but I found the exact piece I was looking for at BitMit. I hadn't been able to find it by trudging the shops or at Amazon. It arrived on time, in good condition, and made a great birthday present for my wife.

I bet double-spends can be detected, just not if you're doing an offline transaction.

One way this could be done is for each transaction to carry around all of its inputs (to use the Bitcoin terminology), right back to the original input that loaded value onto the chip. Then, the double-spends get detected when chips are eventually "cashed in". The double-spends can be investigated and prosecuted by regular means (i.e. police evidence gathering rather than cryptographic techniques).

That, combined with the low transaction size limit and the high cost of extracting the key, is probably sufficient in practise to keep fraud low.

I'm with Jon too.

My wife and I switched to part-time work when we had children. We've never regretted it, and the children are happy and well-adjusted. Plus they've learned all about living economically.

It's my understanding that there's no minimum turnover unless the PLC seeks listing on a stock exchange. However, to form a PLC there must be a minimum of £50,000 allotted shares.

If I could give a good answer, I'd be in a position to start a good competitor to GLBSE

I mean that, sooner or later, an unprincipled GLBSE user who loses money will try to sue GLBSE. So GLBSE needs a set of T&C which is as protective as possible.

Furthermore, it benefits EVERY user of GLBSE for the T&Cs to be strongly protective of GLBSE, because otherwise GLBSE will get shut down.

This is an interesting situation, because it's often perceived as beneficial for T&Cs to be as favorable to the user as possible. However, when the business is ethical, and the regulatory environment is not, it's better for the T&Cs to favor the business.

Agreed. Apart from that it's OK. I think GLBSE is more vulnerable, and needs more protection, than its users.