This statement is just *wrong* (and is itself a straw-man argument).

With other blockchains that also work trustlessly why on earth is anyone being pushed to rely on trusted 3rd parties?

Of course they are not (OP should fix that IMO).

I think the ATs could fairly easily be modified to do the sorts of things you want (they are Turing complete after all and are in charge of their own funds).

I am not talking about forks but different blockchains.

This is why I designed AT: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822100.0

(it allows "atomic" trustless transfers to occur across blockchains)

Whilst I am not against raising the 1 MB limit I do think that this idea that their should be "only 1 chain" is actually rather "stupid".

The very point of decentralisation is not to have a single point of failure - yet this is constantly what Bitcoin is trying to do (set itself up as the single point of failure).

I don't see the future as being just Bitcoin but in fact numerous blockchains that you'll use if you want (making this whole storage issue really a pointless argument).

Trying to have Bitcoin solve every single problem is just silly - it will never suit all purposes and this is why we will have many blockchains.

The article does quote the website used to create the hash (it has been around for quite a while).

It wouldn't be a fork as you can do this now (by creating nonsense address hashes).

Of course I agree it is a bad idea to bloat the blockchain in general - but I'd rather offer that for free than to see someone making money out of it.

The concept is nothing new ("black hole" addresses such as "1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE" are exactly the same thing).

If people really want to do this and do it for free then I'll build it into the CIYAM Wallet (so the OP gets nothing as trying make money from spamming the blockchain should not be supported IMO).

Just got a message from my ING Direct account informing me that I need to fill out a form (presumably in actual paper) to state my US tax status.

Why? I'm not a US citizen (nor have even visited the country) so I guess it is simply because this is what the US government has decided - that every Australian (and I'd guess many other countries also) interest earning bank account holder now needs to do.

Personally I think every US interest earning bank account holder should have to fill out forms to say they are not a taxable entity for every single other country they have forced into to doing this shit to.

Only the hash of the book is actually stored in the blockchain (in case others were wondering).

The key thing that we are focusing on is the development of a platform that makes it very simple to create decentralised applications (through the use of Software Manufacturing).

I don't expect that everyone is going to jump into using decentralised applications for a while but preparing a number of "packages" to do things like handling a Blog, Forum and Project Management should make the transition easier IMO.

You are free to create a "debt coin" if you like (I suspect no-one will use it though).

Those of us who prefer "real money" rather than "debt money" (around 99% of people that use Bitcoin IMO) are not the slightest bit interested in your idea though (do you work for the banking industry?).

You should read the list of rules "that will never be changed" in Bitcoin before suggesting something that is clearly against those rules (it's in the Wiki somewhere - maybe someone else could provide the link).

For someone who claims to have been lurking around to learn about Bitcoin for a year it seems strange to me that you don't get the fundamentals of its purpose (most people *get it* within a few minutes by watching a video like WeUseCoins).

Indeed Beijing is nowhere near the most polluted city in China.

http://www.theuknews.com/index.php/nav/newsr/5228

Please note that 20 BTC is still waiting for someone to "step up" and implement AT in a Bitcoin clone.

One thing to be very careful about is how you generate your paper wallet as @gmaxwell has recently pointed out you would not be wise to use any current .js wallet generator (such as bitaddress.org and even if offline) due to potentially poor random number generation and code that has not been thoroughly peer reviewed.

I don't think the political system is the major obstacle but instead the massive scale of the problem they've put themselves in through their amazing feats of construction (it will have the world's largest subway system soon).

Probably they were led by economists to believe that solutions will come out of further growth and so rather than scaling back they turned it up to ten.

I think the whole world is hoping that innovation will be tested and perfected in China in order to do that (if it isn't then the pollution is eventually going to affect everyone in the world).

True - but as they don't have state funded health care for most people the expense will be born by the people (and China has an abundance of people).

Phew - after a pretty much non-stop 12 hour stretch today the Token package is just about ready to be committed (some minor look and feel improvements and final testing still to go).

Tokens can be either "redeemable" or "non-redeemable" (the latter just being useful as a limited supply of crypto secured items that can be transferred).

You can place an Offer to sell a token (equivalent to an "ask" in trading) or a Request to buy a token (equivalent to a "bid" in trading) and these are matched automatically.

Transferring requires entering a secret that matches a secret hash that is tied to the request or token itself (the latter is for redeeming).

This makes the tokens perfect for use with ACCT (atomic cross-chain transfer) which the AT project is hoping to achieve soon.

My guess is that and also that he/she/they didn't realise about the malleability issue (otherwise the sig would never have been included in the transaction hash).