I can't wait until you assholes get fucked over I'm to be laughing my fucking head off

So you're saying North Korea is the only rational country around in that it doesn't pour vital energy out to the heavens for no reason? 

How Paypal robs the Bank of England

Digital currencies might start creating a sticky situation for central banks.

Have you ever wondered how the rise of digital currencies will impact on the monetary base, and the effects that will have on seigniorage revenue to governments worldwide? No? Well, this pair of articles by the Financial Times' Izabella Kaminska, "Why central banks should take charge of their digital currencies" and "Turning mobile money into M0" is interesting nonetheless.

Kaminska examines the typical problem central banks have with digital currencies, which is that they tend to mess around with the way banks expect the money supply of the nation to work. The immediate downside of that is that it impacts on seigniorage, the revenue accrued to a government by its right to mint coinage.

In other words, when you use PayPal rather than posting a £50 note, you need never hold that currency, and the government never receives the revenue for having printed it.

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How can nations fight back? (Assuming, of course, they ought to fight back — but that revenue is likely to be mighty tempting.) One possibility is by working with digital currency vendors to create payment mechanisms which don't require holding a parallel currency to work. And make no mistake, even though PayPal denominates its accounts in pounds and dollars, it's a parallel currency in all but name.

Jean-François Groff, one of the pioneers of the Web at CERN, is working on that option. Mobino, his company, is a mobile payment system which works on real-time debiting, not on keeping a float of a second currency on tap:

    Mobino’s system aims to cut out as many intermediaries from the debit process as possible by getting you, the customer, to strike up a single direct debit agreement with itself. The company then charges the customer for transactions conducted with partner vendors, whilst the customer deals only with Mobino rather than a multitude of online or retail vendors.

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But, while Kaminska mentions it in passing, it would be interesting to see the analysis applied to Bitcoin. Lord knows the currency has its flaws, but it's the only one of the successful(ish) mobile payment systems which actually embraces the fact that it is a parallel currency — and a freely floating one, at that. The Bitcoin ecosystem has a specific method for distributing the seigniorage it generates, but also gradually reduces that rate; by 2140, the system will likely be in de-facto deflation.

By moving the transaction entirely into a parallel currency, the system is also more efficient than even Mobino could ever hope to be — provided you don't plan on converting Bitcoins into real-world money. If you do, things get trickier; the exchanges have had a number of high-profile failures, and are probably the weakest point in a network which manages to combine cryptographic perfection with an incredible amount of possibilities for human error.

It may be the case that central banks have to start examining what their role would be in a world of digital currencies; but if they do, it may be better for them to skip the sticking-plaster world of PayPal and Mobino and move straight to something designed for an all-digital world from the start.

Sorry for necro bump but this guy is a proper Genius who sits in a dark with thousand times less views than he deserves, I just cant stop wondering what is wrong and whether is he censored (but the answer is no)
Being Australian where privacy of electronic communication is legally monitored by the government makes him even bigger in my eyes, proper discrete hero of our time, deserves much more publicity and attention in my humble opinion.

Invest just 6 minutes of your life in watching this video I promise it will be smart invested time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o66FUc61MvU

And tip the guy with bit-cent if you can afford it or don't, like or dislike him but do WHATCH the video, he deserves to be heard by this community, give him that chance.

Sorry for too much words, point is to click the link and pay attention, and if the flow is too fast for you or you are not native English speaker you can turn on subtitles in almost any world language. Hope you'll enjoy.

Great article! How do I know if this will also make it to their paper version? I would buy a bunch of them

"Companies like Amazon are considering an introduction." … very interesting but I doubt that this journalist knows of something like that without me knowing it first =D

Moving the Liberty Movement - A young GOP congressman appeals to young libertarian voters.

It’s 3:45 p.m. on a Saturday, and at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, D.C., a conference room is packed with college students. It’s standing room only, and there’s barely enough of that for all the 18- to 25-year-olds who are trying to jam into the space, which is already noticeably warmer than the rest of the hotel and has begun to smell a little ripe. College students don’t care. In 15 minutes, Republican congressman Justin Amash is going to defend the existence of government to a room full of anarcho-capitalists.

Let’s backtrack. This weekend, about 1,500 college students and recent graduates descended on the Hyatt for the International Students for Liberty Conference. There are libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, would-be seasteaders, recalcitrant Republicans, Ayn Rand devotees, and just about every other possible iteration of the so-called liberty movement, a big-tent designation for activists galvanized by typically libertarian issues, including opposition to drone warfare, support for marijuana legalization, ending the Federal Reserve Bank, decreasing U.S. military presence overseas, and protecting individuals’ freedom to do just about anything they want. They run an ideological gamut, from Michael Malice, a writer fond of saying that you can’t vote your way out of tyranny (and who, as far as I can tell, thinks all government is immoral), to John Ramsey and Preston Bates, who run a super PAC dedicated to helping libertarian-leaning candidates win elections as Republicans.

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Or they could chat up two brothers, Zach and Josh Harvey, who just started a bitcoin-consultation business. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, all-online currency that’s particularly appealing to libertarians because of the obvious absence of central banking (as well as the invulnerability to inflationary monetary policy). It’s most famously used to buy drugs, since exchanges are, besides instantaneous, untrackable, at least according to the Harveys. About $300 million worth of bitcoin is floating around, and there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins. (One bitcoin is currently worth about $26.40.) It’s not just getting spent on designer painkillers, though. WordPress and Reddit both just started accepting payment in bitcoin, and there are a number of small businesses that take it as payment, including a new website that lets you order pizza online using the currency. Apparently if you can’t end the Fed, you can just ignore it.

Another group that accepts bitcoin was also exhibiting: the Free State Project, a group of “liberty-minded” people who are trying to recruit 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire and vote to make the state a libertarian paradise. You can use your bitcoin to pay for admission to the Free Staters’ annual festival. But if you’re old-fashioned, you can just use gold or silver, too.

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I don't think you understand cryptography. If both SHA256 and ECSDA are compromised, funds can be shifted around at will irregardless of the true owners. All private keys would be open to anyone who knows the hack.