They have futures and shorts on margin? Where?

We just need a futures and short market. Those will smooth things out in my opinion.

That makes me worried. I just mailed some more cash to him.

I may be in the minority here but aside from the potential publicity from this, I don't consider this too big a deal.

If the CIA wanted to stop Bitcoin, there would be no reason to tap Gavin. He has no control over third party clients. The CIA probably knows this and so they are probably just trying to gather information on Bitcoin.

That being said, there ultimately is no partnership to be made between Bitcoin and the U.S. government. Bitcoin is completely antithetical to the government operations of central banking and taxation. As it has been speculated previously in this thread, the CIA and other government agencies could use Bitcoin to send untraceable international remittances to agents. Therefore, while Bitcoin is relatively small, it could have uses for the government. However, the endgame is the end of taxation as we know it and central banks.

As it has been stated before, some forms of taxation could exist in a Bitcoin economy, but they wouldn't produce nearly as much revenue as the traditional tax system with paycheck withholding and the income tax. The cost of collecting taxes at current rates in a Bitcoin economy would skyrocket, making it futile.

The best outcome of this presentation will be increased publicity for Bitcoin and to allay the fears of the CIA and other government agencies to stall any direct attack on Bitcoin.

What's funny is that they clearly don't understand Bitcoin and it's decentralized nature. If they did, they wouldn't have contacted Gavin at all. They have a statist mindset brought about from being used to negotiating with some leader or ruler in power. It appears Gavin is the closest thing to a 'leader' of Bitcoin other than Satoshi. But in reality there is no one to negotiate with because anyone can write a new Bitcoin client and put it up for download.

It would be a lot easier to buy BTC if online exchanges started acceping GreenDot MoneyPak and Paysafecard. That would allow anyone to go to a Walmart etc. buy a cash card and then use that to get BTC. It's better than PayPal because there are no chargebacks.

As for gold, there are actually a significant number of localized gold dealers. BTC doesn't have anywhere near that kind of local access. If it did, I would be a lot more optimistic about 20 USD/BTC.

20 USD/BTC is extremely unlikely this year.

Can someone tell me how BTC is going to the moon when it is still relatively difficult to acquire in the first place? I imagine there are a lot of people who think Bitcoin is really cool but don't get involved much past playing around with the small amount of BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. Given the difficulty of acquiring BTC, I think the fact that BTC made it to almost $2 is amazing in the first place.

It took a couple weeks for me.

I vote yes.

As I pointed out before, you aren't asking us (anarchists) to merely build something better, you are asking us to build something better under the duress of regulation, taxation and forceful seizure. Let me know when I can build a private post office that delivers first class mail. Oh wait, someone already did. His name was Lysander
Spooner, and they shut down his operation. Don't tell anyone to build something better while at the same time you support individuals in power who are actively disallowing such private institutions to be built in the first place.


That doesn't improve the position. In fact it makes it look very bad. Your position is more of brute force, rather than anything rational. Many people support states for a number of reasons. I believe they do out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. None of that changes the illegitimacy of the actions of the individuals in government.


I have no desire to investigate the best or worst form of government. I'd rather see the government shrivel up, die and blow away in the wind.


Let me know when I can get a permit to rip out public roads and start building private ones. The fact that someone uses monopolized services has nothing to do with their ideology, and the government monopolizing such industries can't take any credit because there is nothing to compare their work to. You are striking out big time on logic.


No, what is disingenuous is switching back and forth between arguing for the free market and arguing for statism and socialism. By constantly switching back and forth between these two beliefs, one can look like they are bringing the 'best of both worlds' together. In reality, they have just created a new insanity.This is because they are saying the same entity that is needed to run the roads (something of lesser complexity) cannot run a stock market (something of much much greater complexity). And the same types of entities that can run a stock market cannot run roads. Third way politics is insanity. Fortunately, I was able to free myself from such conundrums years ago.

You clearly didn't read the essay I linked to because your question was already answered there, and the answer is no. People don't need to be convinced to bring about a functioning anarchy anymore than they need to be 'convinced' of the merits of millions of already preexisting businesses. Did anyone need to be 'convinced' that a supermarket, donut shop or movie theater should be built? Not really. They already desired groceries, donuts and movies. In the same way a functioning anarchy would be created out of individual desire in absence of government institutions.


No, I don't want to debate this any further because your arguments have been very poor, and have been addressed in many other places all over the Internet. Here is one place you can start off at: http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html

So why do we have to play fair but the government doesn't? Your whole position sounds like a massive double standard. The government can audit us, spy on us, inflate away our wealth, give trillions away to the wealthy and connected, but we gotta 'play by the rules'.


I do not support 'opposition groups' or any kind of action that flies under a political banner. Therefore, I don't support a collectively organized overthrow of the government, because the leader of that group would just form another government. This has happened in Egypt and other countries where an unpopular regime has fallen, only to be replaced by an 'opposition group' that gets its meat hooks into the country's resources in due time. That being said, I have no problem with the use of violence to defend one's property against the terrorcrats. Unfortunately, such action is not currently practical and is rather foolish due to the overwhelming force the state employs. That's why I agree with John T. Kennedy, who says that the revolution will occur when the cost of ruling people goes up too high for it to be worthwhile: http://anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=242. Bitcoin is an excellent means towards that state of affairs.


The political process is controlled by individuals with desires that are no more legitimate than anyone else's, but are actually less so, because as I stated before, the political process is an illegitimate means of acquiring resources. Take away all the the ceremonies, signatures and political cheerleaders and it is tantamount to saying "These guys over here want me to take and control your stuff, so I'm going to do it." Most people drive themselves crazy because they can't decide if the government is a legitimate entity providing services or just a type of 'mafia'. It really is just a 'mafia'.

As for Somalia, I leave that to be debated elsewhere. I would like to point out that North Korea is the logical epitome of a government enthusiast's world view. However, the vast majority of statists living elsewhere wouldn't want to live there. They enjoy too many luxuries and comforts provided by hampered but still anarchic business activities of their home countries.

I think you are confused about something. A government, by definition, does not 'compete fair and square.' Just to use an extreme example, Kim Jong Il does not let the people of North Korea try out new ideas. He throws them into a labor camp for an indeterminate amount of time for dissenting. This is an extreme example, but there are many other less extreme examples which are analogous. I cannot open a private post office in the U.S. that delivers first class mail as a less extreme example.

A government is an entity that externalizes costs. What this means is that the government consists of individuals allocating, diverting and regulating resources that are not their own. They do this through the popular belief that their political processes grant them the de jure right to do so. It is this belief that I vehemently challenge. No political process can grant anyone the right to touch resources they didn't receive on a voluntary basis. People in the government may or may not be trying to do 'good things', but they are doing it with other people's resources. I don't care what they invent, or what your or they think they are doing. The grabbed other people's stuff under duress.

To sum all of this up, my desire is to destroy any entity that externalizes costs. This includes, gangs, thieves, mafias and governments. For me there is no 'government lite'. Smash it all to bits NOW is my modus operandi.

Anarcho-capitalism made it to 'featured' status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism. We ought to be able to get Bitcoin there too!

Won't happen. If major vendor X was in the U.S. (e.g Amazon.com), they would get slammed by the IRS, Department of Justice, FBI and Homeland Security. The politicians and feds would be on them so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. Either that or their executives start getting calls from high up government officials telling them to not even think about putting Bitcoin on their site.

No, because as soon as people found out that someone was buying up all the bitcoins they would hold out and wait for the price to go sky high.

It wouldn't make sense for the company to get a portion of each stock sale because just like any other privately owned good, you can only sell it once.

A company goes public for a variety of reasons. Two of the main reasons are as follows:

1. To raise capital during an IPO (initial public offering). By selling off the company shares to investors in an IPO, the company raises capital to invest in its growth, pay off debt, etc.

2. Allow management and employees of the company to cash in their stock options and receive the full value of their shares. The shares of a private company are usually traded under extremely limited circumstances (e.g. from one employee to another). This being the case, under such limited circumstances, individuals with the company who own significant quantities of company shares cannot be certain of the value of each share. The shares could be extremely valuable or perhaps almost worthless. In absence of being sold on a broader market, it is near impossible to value the shares properly.

The video is great, too bad there isn't a user friendly client to go with it. 

By putting bounties on each bug fix and feature, Gavin and the other bitcoin developers will be able to tell which features and bug fixes are most urgent. Each part of the project has it's own price! This pricing mechanism for FOSS projects is a radical improvement over the model of putting arbitrary priorities on bugs and features.

Thanks for the info and links. I'm going to check out fivegrinder. I had heard of it before but never checked it out.

What are your skills in regards to web app development? I'm willing to chip in 200 BTC. That should get you some hosting for awhile. Check out the hosts you can get here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Hosting

This is awesome, but can it be used to fund non-bitcoin projects? Did you see my post here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4435.0