i could write a 5 page essay explaining the whole financial scam involved in healthcare and insurance., but thats off-topic, so to summarise in short.
a hospital built in 1980 is paid in full (no mortgage or rent)
the heart rate monitors/x-rays/MRI bought by heart foundations and government healthcare budgets are pre-bought. no rental or per-use fee's
surgeons and nurses get paid a salary, whether they are in a operating room, or the staff canteen all day.
the only true costs of surgery are things that cannot be used twice (scalpels, sutures, gauze)
MHO (medical health organizations) make profit by having actual costs.. and then adding on fake rents, charging excessive fee's for use of TV, phone even an extra pillow.

if uk national insurance/american halthcare insurance was obliterated. and there was a system of pay what you use, on a TRUE and NON-profit basis, you would see the true costs

if you strip away all the fake fee's and see a true cost of surgury. then look at the final bill. you will be shocked.


6-7 figure liability, but only 2-3 digit premium cost

so we have:
gavin: foundation paid
garzik: bitpay paid
luke Jr: eligius paid
hand full of others: paid privately
hand full of others: doing it voluntarily.

= not halted

ethics.. are not regulations..
business ethics are about consumer protections. such as activision cannot pre-sale the next call of duty, unless they have a proper release date that is reasonably close. if activision breached this they could get sued.. ButterFlyLabs should have been sued sooooo many times by now, and thats nothing to do with banking regulations.

im all for consumer protections.. but not regulations (a whole different kettle of fish). bitcoin users/customers need to learn their consumer rights to ensure businesses they use their coins on, are ethical. if not, report them.

bringing knowledge of consumer rights will ensure wallet/exchanges do not do fractional reserving, do not steal, and not offer false promises. or they will get sued.

actually, if banks did hold bitcoins as a financial product they offer. it wouldnt be to much of a stretch for them to try off-chain transactions.
by giving people a SQL bank database balance of bitcoins and let people trade the database (leading to fractional reserving) where there are only 21million real bitcoins, but the banks showing 1billion bitcoins on their SQL database..

... just like the current FIAT debt crisis
... just like karpals let people trade his SQL database while hiding the real coins.

its been over a decade and a half but here is my rebuttle anaolgy based on that past experience (to get on the same level as most viewers)

i can store my sweaty shoes in a school locker. i can store .. anything in a school locker.. does not mean the school is selling me sweaty shoes or anything else. they are just providing a storage box.

you will not see a bank teller swap FIAT for sweaty shoes, baked beans or bitcoins..

litecoin development is continuing, https://www.litecoinlocal.org/ just started up to allow for litecoins to be bought and sold for fiat. but litecoin does need a whole lot of merchant adoption.. no point buying litecoins if there is not much to spend them on.

bitcoin has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of merchant services. litecoin wont die.. but i agree it will definitely lag behind. as for the altcoin script kiddies with their copy and past wallets and dice games. life expectancy of altcoins is about 3-6months before the sheeple cotton on to the reality that they have been left holding a bag of sheep droppings

excuse the analogy
bitcoin: healthy human, life expectancy 80+years, intelligent and has a chance to control the world one day
litecoin: disabled human, life expectancy unknown, lack of social skills and wont aspire to be a leader of a community
altcoin: a clone, with birth defects, life expectancy, 3-6months. wont reach critical life achievements such as walking/running within the community.

in reality banks are under contract to only touch FIAT directly, by the mint/fed/government.

but in a hyperthetical / political fiction story.
anyone can get bitcoins more easily, and businesses can pay bills/taxes more easily.

but that wont happen in reality. its far easier to make bitcoin grow to a point that bank accounts are not needed for daily living. rather then getting banks to distribute bitcoins.

not efficient?
the whole point of distributed ledger is the security of bitcoins. if there was only 1 database that everyone views.. then bitcoin would break. having copies of it on thousands of computers is the beauty of bitcoin. its the main point of how bitcoin works

read all of the bank announcements. they only deal with fiat directly. not bitcoins, not baked beans not gold.

if you want bitcoins go to an exchange/localbitcoins
if you want baked beans go to a grocery store
if you want gold go to a pawn shop.

if banks included bitcoins as on of their 'financial products' then regulation will own bitcoins

very true. the wild west was full of armed bandits robing stage-coach's/banks for gold. selling fools gold, and faked plots of land salted with gold dust and pretending to be gold rich soil..

{off topic}
alt coins are not made by talented coders. they are made by script kiddies that go to a website, follow instructions and change maybe 5 values. before compiling a wallet..

these script kiddies then sell their useless premined coins for bitcoins. and leave the crapcoin recipients holding the bag of worthless coins. this process has nothing to do with bitcoin and i think no one should attempt to buy an altcoin unless it has a proven track record.

+1 i guess you seen through the subtlety of what the news was really about. the OP's alarming title was purely to get people to read it.. free advertising for mike hearn.

but taking mike hearns advert of lightouse out of the picture for a moment.. Wladimer no longer working on the protocol, who is his replacement, and kinda strange that he has only been on the job a month or 2. either way the foundation, bitpay and other businesses are still throwing money in programmers direction, even if mike hearn isnt one of them.

im wondering if wladimer disagreed with luke JR's godcomplex/greed. or the foundation paedo connection.

in the 1990's many people were afraid to use their credit cards on websites due to scam sites. financial regulation did not solve this problem. consumer protection did. EG businesses had to register with their state and search engines monitored phishing sites.

bitcoin sites will do the same, if th site does not look legit and does not have legit 'whois data' dont use it. report it!

any legit business, no matter what currency it uses, should not have who-is guards. leave who-is guards for the shady illegal businesses and accept the risks that if your dealing with shady criminals, expect to get extorted.

there have ben many 'theories' of having what we have now (full nodes) to be called th future supernodes (containing all blockchain) and clients that just download headers, and only download a block that is relevant to their transactions/addresses from the supernodes

but this then dilutes the amount of copies of the ledger if this became the norm as only maybe 1000 people would want to be full nodes, making it slightly more riskier for the community.


games like call of duty, world of war craft, titan falls.. all have datasizes that surpass 20gb. so most people truly into computing and gaming, dont have an issue with 20gb. just a shame you cant download these great games

at the moment the blockchain can fit onto a 32gb SD card which costs only a few dollars/pounds so its not like people need to buy multiple servers, costing thousands..

secondly even as far back as the genesis block, there are still unspent coins. so trying to prune away blocks that have 100% spent values which also lead to new blocks that have 100% spent values to ensure the blockchain doesnt break due to having no previous block to reference, is at the moment a big task.

after all new blocks have references of old blocks, so there would need some sort of buffer of a block or two from an unspent block before getting to the pruned(spent) block.. thus out of all blocks made, there are very few that are prunable..

which brings me back to the first point. data is only a sub $20 data store. so the importance to prune is still not a big deal, and the solution wont show much of a change in data size (EG current 20gb would maybe get 1GB pruned off, max)

good good
i dont just copy and paste fud like others do (EG the OP).. i love doing research and looking behind the scenes for true meanings. and i truly hate fud, hence why i even put a information risk warning in my footer. no one should take anything posted on this forum as gospel.. too much fud, especially when real financial value is involved, no one should make rash investment decisions before doing their own research

though i do my own research, i put information into context and look behind the face value of the words printed. please read my footer. do not take anything i say as gospel. use my 'opinion' as a starting point of your own investigation/research and for your own opinions based off of your own research and other 'opinions'/sources.

i only trust my own research but never ask others to fully trust me.

always try to read the source material yourself and not blindly believe opinions made by media or forum posts. unless after doing your own research you came to the same conclusion

he says companies dont help pay to keep the protocol up-to-date, even mentioning bitpay..... lol guess he dosnt know that bitpay are giving jeff garzik a salary, just to allow garzik to keep bitcoin updates running.

also that many bitcoin businesses, bitinstant, coinbase, bitcoinstore. are/were paying the bitcoin foundation fee's which pay for the other elite devs of bitcoin-core to continue doing what they do..

is mike hearn just butt-hurt that he isnt getting a slice of the corporate pie to work on his bitcoinj project?

.... but more importantly
And of those, Wladimir [J. van der Laan] and Cory [Fields] refuse to work on the protocol, partly because of the social issues that have come up.”

Wladimer no longer the main protocol coder?? ....... so is gavin now taking back the hotseat?

standard consumer investment warning, that any non-contracted (no guarantee) investments have a risk of going up AND DOWN. this is all


BANKS will not hand customers bitcoins! (or baked beans)  

if an account holder mentions their business plan is bitcoin related get account holders information and verify they have the appropriate documents (telecommunication regulations license) are supplied and valid by passing the information to the head office to look at.


if the account holder has NOT met relevant regulatory requirements (license reference numbers supplied) then:..... shut them down...

its not a blanket ban on bitcoins. it a notice to ensure that any basement dwelling knobs that think they dont need FIAT regulation licenses, whilst still wanting to play with FIAT. purely because 50% of the business is bitcoin related.. should be shut down.

summary:
if your a bitoin business that ALSO sends fiat to customers, get a licence!

blocks have a 1MB limit each.. at the moment each block is only 20% utilised. meaning 0.2mb
6 blocks an hour over 24 hours, over 365 days

utility growth estimate = 10gb a year
full limit utilised estimate = 52gb a year

i see in no way that next year the block chain would be anywhere near 150GB larger.. the maths just doesnt work that way.

the only reason your seeing new 130mb files appearing on your system every few minutes, is because your system is updating historic data.. not live current data.. (your wallet is not synced yet)

at the very most live data is only 144mb a day
(1mb block limit x 144 blocks a day)