For similar reasons for buying a cheap, milsurp rifle.  To give it to your unarmed neighbor when the zombies are knocking at the door.

Pretty much the entire part I highlighted.

EDIT: Or, perhaps, a very distorted understanding of Satanism?

You have a very distored view of Americans.

Actually, in America the number that don't pay anything would have started out as 5, and the one rich guy would be paying closer to $70.  The top 5% in the US pay roughly 80% of the total taxes.  That's not a tax rate, mind you, that's the net total tax revenue.  49% of the population pays zero net taxes to the federal government, and roughly half of them get more from federal programs and grants than they pay in.  I should know, I'm one of those who get back as much as I pay in.  The irony there is that I pay in a lot.  I earn a great deal of money, upper middle class even by US standards; yet I have a lot of deductions and tax credits.  For example, I'm a foster parent; so the government (via block grants to states, and then the state to me) pays for the expenses of those fosters.  Althouh that is mostly just a repayment, I do literally receive just about as much money via those reimbursements than i pay in federal taxes.  And I'm in a middle class tax bracket, and paid in about $13K last year.

This is functionally what the merkle tree does.  Each transaction has it's own hash, which is then included into a binary hash tree with one other transaction, and then each of those hashes are paired and hashed again to form the full merkle tree.  The last hash (merkle root) is included into the block header, which is then hashed again when the next block includes it into it's own header, thus forms the 'chain' part of the blockchain.  That merkle hash root inside the block header is intended to represent that entire block (in the sequence of the lifespan of the blockchain) once every transaction included into that block has been spent.  Presumedly in the future a great many blocks would be reduced to only the 80 byte, fixed length, headers after a few years time.  There are already several blocks that could be pruned down this way to only those headers, but the pruning functions have not yet been implimented into any client that I am aware.  Mostly because it's not consider a pressing need at the moment.

Not all clients need to download the blockchain, just full clients for users who don't want to have to trust anyone as well as miners.  Also, even full clients can prune long spent transactions from their local copy of the blockchain, this is one of the functions of the merkle tree structure within a block.  Certain types of full clients can't do this for practical reasons, but any end-user full client could do it and still be able to verify every transaction that comes it's way.


Try it.  See what happens.

EDIT: To end your suspense, it won't have any noticable effect upon the network as a whole, as this has been considered and already adapted for.  You will, however, succeed in losing your entire balance due to tiny fees required for 'low priority' transactions.  This will still take some time, however, since the network will largely ignore spammy transactions, due to a built in 'point scale' system that discounts bitcoins that have recently been spent.  This doesn't prevent any valid transaction from occurring, but it does delay those that they system consiers spammy.


there has been much discussion on the topic of end users in Africa, mostly as bitcoin as a replacement for M-Pesa.  Do more research, you will learn much of value to your position.

I've never cashed out.  Never intend to.

I doubt it, but one productive example of interest free savings is as a form of insurance.  For example, certain religious groups believe that they are commanded to prepare for foreseeable events.  The bible mentions famines, fires, etc.  So these denominations might expect each family to "stock up" on consumables, or an entire church might stock a food bank.  Cash can be horded for similar effect.  Not for the goal of investment at all, but "saving for a rainy day".  This kind of saving is self-insurance against whatever future losses that might present themselves.  Individuals do this, so do corporations.  Both do it using many methods; individuals could do it by stuffing cash into a mattress, buying gold or silver rounds, or a large pantry stocked with non-perishable.  Corporations could do it by warehousing materials needed for manufacturing inputs, such as steel or plastics; by speculating on the futures markets for same, or by hoarding cash, quite literally in a 'cash-on-hand' account; or by buying gold.  Governments do the same thing, usually by hording resources such as oil.

Funds used in this manner are sometimes put into low risk investment methods, such as a money market account, but the general idea is that those funds should not be put at risk of loss, because they are insurance not investments.

If we did, we would all be austrians.  Praxeology (which includes logic, so that statement is redundant) is uniquely related to Austrian Economic theory.  It's not much of a stretch to say that Praxeology is Austrian Economic theory as applied to all of human intereactions, and not just value exchanges.

I teach Praxeology to middle shool aged homeschoolers at a local coop, and from what I've read of your arguments (admittedly, less than before when we had our debates a few months ago) I question your understanding of Praxeology.  I question mine as well, as it applies to Bitcoin.  I don't think that there is enough available data to make any judgements.  The great risk is letting your own prefrences color your conclusions.  just because you (or I) might consider one perspective the logical reaction, does not necessarily make it so.


Take this statement for example.  You misrepresent the Austrian persepctive, likely because you don't understand it; which implies that you don't understand the praxeological argument behind it.  Austrians don't oppose all things public, nor do we oppose public monetary systems because they are public.  Simply put, we oppose central banking because it's an affront to the free market system.  When a central bank sets intrest rates, it's engaging in price controls of half of nearly every private exchange.  Gold is favored by Austrians because it's historically money, not because it is perfect.



You still havn't shown how to do that without breaking autonomy, as far as I know.  Also, the praxeological argument trips up the idea of demurrage.  Demurrage is a forced loss, but Bitcoin exists.  So there is no logical reason (that I can see) that such a cyrptocurrency with demurrage would be favored by savers.  Like it or not 'hoarders' contribute to the value of the currency.

And you don't see anything other than lending as productive savings.  This is far from the case.  The truth is that no matter what we say or argue about it all, it's too complex for any of us to summarize completely.  Trained professionals have been arguing these points for decades.  Since the topic is too complex for any of us to completely understand, we must all simplify it in our heads.  Create our own economic worldview, so to speak.  Ultimately, it comes down to belief; which economic theory do each of use consider to be most accurate?  I believe Austrian Economic theory to be most accurate in a great many ways.  IMHO, this is how one can tell which economists to listen to...

Which ones make a significant majority of their personal income from their personal investments?  Peter Thiel is an Austrian, and kicks Krugman's ass; but doesn't offer advice publicly.  Mish is an Austrian as well as Schiff, both offer advice; both appear to do better on their personal investments than Krugman.  Krugman does better on his public appearances and writing royalties, much better. 

In the long run, our opinions matter very little.  Create your alt-coin jtimon, and let the market decide.

No, not mining.

Paypal competitor fail.

Commenter knowledge fail.

Leaving already?

It can be done securely, but not in the same manner as the bitcoin network does it.  The key difference here is risk management.  Accepting transactions offline does involve some level of risk, much like accepting instant/zero-comfirmation transactions at a point-of-sale terminal with live internet.  Accepting only transactions after 6 or more confirmations provides a (nearly) absolute certainty that the transaction is valid and cannot be reversed, but those kind of transactions requiring that level of certainty are and will be rare.  Bitcoin only grows if use cases involving lower, yet acceptable, levels of risk are possible.  As of yet, they are not possible; but this is because no clients support methods of risk assessment nor deliberately accepting zero-conf transactions.


Doing a double spend online is trivial, because on the Internet no one knows your a serial thief.  The hard part is doing this offline, as in person with someone you are dealing with or inside a vendor's shop, and defrauding them without getting pinched.  The risk of that possiblity is a strong, but not absolute, deterrent against attempting a double-spend for relatively low value transactions.  It's true that a simple double spend attempt is technically trivial if leaving evidence of the fraud isn't a concern, as that would simply involve the backing up & restoration of a wallet.dat file.  However bitcoin is no more anonymous in person than cash is, and probably less likely to be accepted by someone that doesn't know you.  Try to buy a candy bar at a gas station with cash anonymously.  While it's true that the attendent neither knows nor cares what your name is, your face is on camera the entire time.  A double spend is still fraud and can be expected to be pursued in like manner whenever such a pursuit is possible.

In direct contradiction to what Foxpup just told you, the real answer is yes but....

Any client needs access to the network occasionally, but it is not always a requirement for safety.  The trick is that, should a client be developed for this purpose since one does not yet exist (I'm confident that one will eventually, the Bitcoincard is one such possibility) such a client would have to keep not only the transactions that it would use for the inputs to an offline transaction, but also a copy of the merkle tree that each fits it and the entire set of block headers.  This would allow the receiving client to check and see that the sender had honestly once owned those coins.  If these clients were both full clients with blockchains recent enough to both have copies of all input transactions, they would already both that this evidence anyway.  However, the receiving client could not verify that the sending client had not already created a transaction and forwarded it to the network and was trying to pass off a double-spend upon yourself.  A live internet connection to the bitcoin network protects the receiver against this kind of thing pretty well, but sans a live connection the client cannot determine this, so then it would fall upon the user of the receiving client to determine the risks.  Now any double spend attempt is technically difficult, so it would be easy enough for a vendor to accept bitcoins for a fast food meal or something else along those value lines; because the relative difficulty of a double spend attempt even when the attacker knows that the vendor can't have a live connection (Internet kill switch?) would outweigh the value of the fraud.  Credit card companies depend upon this for just about every transaction value under $50.  Also, if you are dealing with someone that you already know (and presumedly trust) you could accept the transaction on faith.

Show them the hardware isle.

You are making assumptions about my reasons for disliking MicroSoft products, and I'm still not sure what they are.

Ah, no.  The bittorrent protocol was invented in 2001, and the SG-1 series ran until 2007.  The 486-66 was old at the time, but it was all that I had until about 2003, when my sister gave me her P166, which was a huge improvement in both sync & framerate.  And I was oversimplifying also.  Running video files on the 66 required me to drop out of X-windows completely and run the video directly on the framebuffer svga driver, which didn't allow for pausing, fast-forwarding or rewinding.  It was either play from the beginning or kill it.  Even restarting a killed process didn't work right.  So when I upgraded to the 166 w/128 megs (IIRC) I was then able to run the videos in X on BlackboxWM.  So, technically, I was disingenuous; as I couldn't really run a video in BlackboxWM until the 166.  I did try BeOS in the late 90's, but it wasn't watching videos that was the killer, it was simply that I had old hardware and linux worked while BeOS (and any modern version of Windows) simply didn't in any functional manner.

These days I'm not so poor, so I'm doing this on a late model iMac because I can afford the extra costs in avoiding MicroSoft products.

I remember trying it back in the 90's, after I'd already tried cutting my own Gentoo/Gnu linux on my own machine running BlackboxWM.  Sorry, but I was watching Stargate SG-1 torrents on a 486-66 with that, and BeOS just didn't seem to stack up.  Nothing ever did.  To this day there are people I meet who doubt that I've compiled my own Gentoo, much less played AVI files on a 66 mhz machine with 64 meg of ram.

No, they didn't.  The $1K daily rule is there to keep BitInstant inline with US banking laws with respect to international transfer agencies.  The laws exist (officially) to frustrate monely laundering efforts, and probably do apply to bitcoin intermediaries in general, although that has never been tested in court as far as I am aware.  If you want to transfer more than that daily limit, you have to extensively identify yourself to BitInstant, who in turn will do so to the US government on your behalf should any of your transactions come under scrutiny