Here's an idea...

If you have a pressing question, ask it in the newbie section.  We do pay attention to the newbie section, it's not just a penalty box, and if you're asking it  perhaps the answer will help others.

Truth, and the next obvious point to be made is that all fiat currencies that were designed by (presumedly honest) human beings are still being run by human beings.  Do you still presume them honest?

I  can pretty much assume that the math functions in my computer are honest, as the souless machine has no vested interest in any particular outcome.  Humans do, and that is the root of the problem with fiat currencies.  Sure, they're great in theory, but in practice they require levels of integrity and wisdom from people in the positions of power that cannot (logicly) be maintained over generations.

The proof-of-work isn't simply wasted watts to make things hard, it also plays an critical role in the cryptographic security model of the blockchain.  Without it, a trusted central server would be required to produce the currency as well as verify that all transactions are valid, thus reintroducing a central bank and central point of failure.

This system doesnt work without proof-of-work, and other methods of trying to do the same thing have been attempted as code forks and every one has been quickly broken by other community members just to illustrate the point.

The US $ isn't stable relative to gold, oil or even the Big Mac index.  The perception of stability is relative to your base standard.  For Americans that standard is the US dollar itself, so of course most prices will appear fairly stable in a currency relative to itself, all the while the average guy blames (Bush/Obama) for the falling value of his house or the rising cost of gasoline.  Compared to gold, or even silver, the cost of a gallon of gasoline is roughly the same, if not a bit cheaper, than it was in the 1960's.

One of the overarching principles of the Amish, all of the various interpretations aside, is that they intend to limit their interdependence upon the non-Amish communities.  The primary reason that electricity is shunned is because, generally speaking, using it requires a dependent relationship on either a power company far away or a generator parts manufacturer & refinery far away.  Sometimes cell phones are permitted in order to allow certain members of the community to interact with outsiders on a business level, but they are certainly not personal property nor utilized by even a large minority of the community.  A bitcoin card would undoubtedly increase the Amish community's interdependence on the greater bitcoin economy, and this fact will not be missed by the elders.  Regardless of the explaintion offered, these are never going to fly in any Amish community.

Also, it wouldn't fly because the Amish don't really use currencies within their communities anyway, as it's mostly a cross between a barter & a gift economy.

Disagree all you want, but scarcity isn't a requirement, only a limited supply.  They are not the same thing.  I should say that scarcity is important in the sense that it affects the value of things, but only as the other side of the equation to demand; however scarcity alone doesn't create that demand.  And if something is too scarce for the common person to have any practical experience with it, such as platinum before 1850, then it ends up being regarded as worthless metal and made into cannons for ships built to carry gold.

I'm not sure that I understand the question.  You can't poll a bitcoin client for it's balance.  None that I know of even allow that as an optional feature with user approval.  The only thing that you could do is capture a card's bitcoin address during an over-the-air transaction, and then scan the blockchain.  But what good would it do you?  Help you find a mark to mug?  A couple of these events and users will be demanding an off (or radio silence) switch and a pin code to use the device at all.  Actually, neither is a bad idea, per se.  If someone mugs you for your wallet, you give it up and are just thankful you didn't get hurt.  If you have a backed up bitcoincard with a pin locked wallet, all they get is a worthless piece of plastic and a small solar cell.  If you didn't back it up, you don't recover your money, but neither do they.  Even guessing a four or five digit pin over and over again is going to take quite a bit of effort and time, and there is no way a mugger could know that you didn't have a backup and will move those funds in the next 1o minutes.

This is quite true, and before the Euro a great many businesses faced constant 'currency risk' of changing exchange rates between the time that a deal was struck and the time it was paid for.  The real issue is that bitcoin isn't big enough to buy the things one needs for a complete economy without said currency risks.  When I can buy gas & groceries (at a competitive cost) locally, and pay my electric bill online, with bitcoin; the voltility of the exchange rate will become irrelevent.

Scarcity is  not a requirement.  Mined & refined silver is more rare in our modern industrial world than mined & refined gold, yet gold still has a higher monetary value.  The same is true for a great many other things, such as 'rare earth' minerals.  Rare earths are not rare, they are just hard to find in a high enough of a concentration to be economically viable otherwise.

Two hops is the default, but there is no real limit.  The default hop can be overriden by software.  Also, these devices are location aware by nature, so vector routing is possible.  Jabber would have to be altered to fit the network model, as I mentioned in the other threads.

Great post, but I still have questions....


Can you tell me if the mesh network uses any existing tech, such as Dash7?


Excellent, this is the practical minimum of an urban mesh network, in my opinion.


I doubt this statement.  As a ham myself, I've seen some pretty wicked tech that is hard to find in any commercial marketplace; but that doesn't mean that it couldn't in a hurry.


This feature concerns me.  I'd rather have a device that was not replicateable at all than one that permits the company to do it via a distant server.  Even if the device asks for user permission, that does not mean that it must.


Which would make it no different than a regular wallet.


Not as cheap as I had hoped, but not unreasonable.

An unaddressed question.  In the video it mentions the capacity to send arbitrary text from card to card (text messaging), did you see evidence that this feature is real?

It does in a way.  I'm sure that different designs will be popular in different regions.  After all, an image of Karl Marx is popular on credit cards in Germany.  Could be because the users like to rub his face in it, literally.  Could be because they used to have his face on the 100 Mark note.

the aluminum & steel cases are both too brittle to reliablely survive reloading, and could become a hazard due to imperceptible cracks.  Berdan priming can technically be reloaded, it's just more difficult and requires different equipment.  Generally it's just not worth it.  A lot of military cases are steel these days because militaries don't reload and so the cheaper initial price of steel over brass becomes significant in the millions of rounds range.

That is the 'labor theory' of value, and is flawed in many ways, athough it does have an intuitive attractiveness to it.  Bitcoin isn't backed by labor, or electic power, or cryptography, or it's userbase, or it's long distance value transfer services.  Historicly, national currencies were 'backed' by gold in the sense that anyone who possesed a unit of currency had the legal and moral right to demand a defined amount of gold from the government agency that produced the currency.  But what backs gold?  The answer is nothing.  Gold is not backed, because it has an independent value.  That value is a matter of perception, developed over a 6K year history of gold as having value.  Bitcoin has value in the same way, meaning it does not require any explicit backing because it's literally valuable in it's own right, just like gold.  It's no one else's liablity, unlike a US$ or any of the payment methods that are based upon it (bank checks, credit cards, PayPal, Google Wallet, Facebook Credits, etc.)  One could make that rational argument that bitcoin derives value because of all of the things that I mentioned in my second sentence, but value is always subjective while a backing is always explict (and therefore, objective) in nature.

After all, as valuable as gold is as a store of value, without that monetary demand gold wouldn't likely be more valuable than lead.  Bitcoin is valuable only due to it's monetary demand, and it has monetary demand because there is a small (but growing) online community of people that believe that bitcoin (as a monetary & exchange system) has and will continue to do as it has promised, and thus see value in participating in that monetary & exchange system.

Except thats not what happens either. Please do a bit of research; this topic has been covered quite well already on this forum.  Keywords "Dash7" "Jabber" and "XMPP" should help.

AX25 networking protocol would largely be manually configured, but that's no longer a requirement.  They were never really intended to be fixed.  Although more modern modes don't call themselves packet radio and don't use hardware TNC and don't use AX25 protocol, they have their basis in packet.   


A dynamicly updated routing table, or a routing table at all, is not a likely condition of this kind of network.  Sensor style networks use passive monitoring to detect reachable peers on the fly, and it's a completely different model than a network that is trying to emulate the mass data transfer capabilities of a wired network.  A bitcoin transaction doesn't need to be routed, it simply needs to be broadcast.

Bullshit.  There are a billion people in this world that don't have regular access to electric lighting.  I can't say that it's all that lucrative of a market, but it's still a market.

And there are many campers & preppers who actually do buy candles for lighting purposes.

Accurate only for that moment.  Once 10.5 million bitcoins have been issued, the block reward cuts in half.  This happens roughly every 4 years, and continues to cut in half every additional four years until the block reward drops below a single bit on the 64 bit integer that holds bitcoin values; after which point no more bitcoins will ever be issued.  This algo results in a total monetary base for bitcoins that is highly predictable and trends towards a (calculas) limit of 21 million bitcoins, but in practice will cease somewhat before hitting that limit.

I'm not sure, but a candle peaks at about 1000 degrees F.

We're running the show, kid.