So do people in Australia not play MMORPGs? Or do they all break the law?

So if I play World of Warcraft and in a raid I get an item I could sell for $30, I have a taxable gain of $30? Do I have to pay taxes every time I level up -- after all, I could sell my account.

A possibly simpler solution would be a server-to-server version of 'getwork'. This would allow standalone mining clients to connect to any Bitcoin node and ask them which transactions they would include in a block they were mining. Right now, anyone can trivially design a standalone miner that mines blocks with no transactions. This would allow them to trivially design a standalone miner that mines blocks with transactions.

There's a "poisoning the well" problem though. If this is used primarily by botnets, it would be very tempting to include invalid transactions to cause them to mine invalid blocks. (The clients would have no way to validate them.) That would just cause them to go back to mining blocks with no transactions though.

If this is the issue, and there's a good chance that it is, there are three possible solutions:

1) Make it more difficult for listening nodes to get what they need to process a block with no transactions.

2) Make it easier for listening nodes to get what they need to process a block with transactions.

3) Raise the transaction fees so that there's enough incentive for botnet operators to get transactions into their blocks.

I presume he'll publish the entire list of accepting addresses for each lottery.

That tells you nothing useful about any individual person.

That, again, tells you nothing about any individual person.

I think that making the decision person by person, and making the decision by the person whose interests are being protected, is always going to be superior to having disinterested people making one decision for everyone.

But in any event, society has no right to say to people, "We know better than you what's good for you, so we're going to force you to act the way we think is best."

Plus, I don't believe you. You may say you care about preventing people from being exploited, but it seems much more likely, and much more sensible, that you're really trying to prevent competition. That is, you are trying to prevent people who *do* benefit from working lots of hours from doing so in the mistaken belief that this makes things easier for people who don't want to work lots of hours. That attitude is not only morally repugnant but it's logically wrong.

You cast your vote in the voting machine, but you also walk out with your vote (and a collection of other votes) secured in a device that you bring with you that is open source (and auditors also get a copy of the votes). If any vote in your device doesn't appear in the final count (or the auditors don't have it), you can provide the signed output of your device. It's a bit complicated to explain in detail, I'll try to put in more details when I get a chance.

I find it much easier to believe that programmers were working for a rational reason then I do that so many programmers were irrational. It's very easy to think that you know what's good for someone better than they do, but you're almost always wrong.

That would result in cast votes not in the final count. Anyone in possession of such a cast vote could demonstrate that it was not in the final count. So while a machine could do that, it would be detectable. So long as the system ensures all cast votes come into the possession of some auditors (which is not difficult to do) all such votes would ultimately be counted.

That's why the voting machine wouldn't be the device you'd trust. The voting *machine* would be like the Bitcoin network. You don't have to trust it because it *can't* break the rules. It *can't* generate a spend for your coins without your key and it doesnt' have your key. If it doesn't process a transaction, you have that transaction and you can demonstrate that it wasn't processed.

The idea is not to convince everyone that the voting system is sound. The goal is to product a voting system that actually *is* sound.

I honestly can't parse this. How can you say that people are free to do something that is illegal? Surely making something illegal deprives people of the freedom to do it. As for being surprised when society tramples on individual freedoms, sure, most people have long since stopped being surprised by it.

The law isn't about people who are exploited. That doesn't even make sense. The law is about stopping people who want to work more hours from doing so as that, the thinking goes, would create competitive pressures on others that would make them want to work more hours to be more competitive. (And, as I argued upthread, that 'logic' is broken anyway.) It is already illegal for an employer to compel an employee to work.

I absolutely, 100% agree that uncertainty is bad. But be clear, he didn't go bankrupt because of deflation, he went bankrupt because he couldn't predict deflation. Any unpredictable change in the value of anything, including money, can cause a sensible plan to fail horribly. This is why hedging and similar techniques are so important.

Other than the fact that inflation acts as a tax when it's monetarily driven, inflation or deflation doesn't matter if it's predictable. If it's unpredictable or chaotic, both inflation and deflation are bad because people cannot reliably know what they should do. So long as it's predictable, it just gets priced in and it all cancels out.

Right, and the only reason those people are competing with him for this job is because, since neither of them can work 70 hours weeks, the two of them are on an equal footing. If this law were eliminated, he would not be competing with them.

Whether that meant he'd look elsewhere or they'd look elsewhere depends on lots of factors. But either way, he wouldn't be competing with them. There are plenty of jobs where being able to work 70 hours a week makes no difference. Teacher, for example.

He's only in competition with those people because of this law. If not for this law, those people would be working 70 hour weeks at jobs where that kind of stamina is maximally valued and he wouldn't be competing with them at all. He'd be looking for a job where that kind of stamina is of no (or minimal) value. If there are people who can outwork him by that much, then he's picked a job at which he's terribly inefficient. An ideal system would discourage him from working in that field, not hold others back so he has a chance.

But at least you recognize that this law doesn't protect people from "abusive management" or some nonsense like that. All it does is hold the hardest-working employees back for the benefit of the less hard working employees. How about a law requiring that the pinky toes of each of the top 10 NBA players be broken to give the other players a chance.

You would be precisely correct if .699 was equal to zero. But it's not. These are averages. Averaging .699 shares per round is very different from averaging zero shares per round. (Otherwise, no batter would ever hit a ball, since they all average fewer than one hit per at bat.)

It would depend on my risk/reward preferences and my capital needs.

The reason people want to borrow money is because they get some surplus from spending money now rather than later. The value of this surplus is independent of the currency. It is this value that is split between the lender and the borrower, and the interest is paid out of this surplus.

To oversimplify, say you want to borrow money to build a factory. You will pay the money back in ten years. The benefit to you of the loan is the surplus you get from being able to build the factory now versus having to build the factory in ten years. This surplus is roughly equal to how much more valuable the goods the factory will make over those ten years are than their cost to make. This value is currency independent.

If the currency is deflating, it is especially valuable because anyone can hold it and gain value from its deflation. Because the currency is especially valuable due to deflation, sellers will accept less of it than they would otherwise for their goods and thus the borrower doesn't need to borrow as much of it as he would otherwise.

The whole point of the design is so that you don't have to trust the machine. You can make it mathematically impractical for the machine to do anything but what it is supposed to, and you can ensure that if it fails to do anything it is supposed to do, it cannot hide that. It's not just theory, the algorithms and methods are known. But nobody has any interest in implementing them.

Not quite. These aren't quite logical proofs like the way you prove two plus two is four. The assumption behind the proof is that deflation is essentially perfectly predictable. In any real-world case, there will still be some uncertainty as to whether the currency will actually deflate. And the argument only applies to currency-driven deflation, not productivity-driven deflation.

In a short-term case, at a minimum, there will be uncertainty about when the deflation will end. That's sufficient to break the argument's "predictable" assumption.

That's correct. Of course, that assumes everyone knows its future value and everyone acts rationally. If you pick cases that come close to those assumptions, the conclusion is valid. If you pick cases that drift from those assumptions, the conclusion gets weaker.

No, because that can be driven by increasing demand. That's why I'm limiting the argument to currency-driven inflation.

This is again why the argument has to be limited to long-term, predictable cases. There won't be sufficient capacity to make an instantaneous adjustment. But in a long-term, predictable curve, this is correct. Speculators cause predictable future changes in commodity value to take effect much sooner than they otherwise would. If there's a continuous stream of predictable value changes (as there more or less is with oil, measured in inflation-correct currency) than speculators will always keep the price higher than it would be without speculation. (Because they are pricing in the future increase.) Of course, oil has storage cost associated with it, so the calculation is not as simple.

But this is basically correct, oil speculators build into today's price as much of the expected future value changes as they are able to until the price today gets close to the present value of the expected future prices. This is the same way currency speculators build into today's value as much of the expected future value as they can.

Tell me where in this chain of logic I lose you.

1) Long-term predictable deflation means that we can know now that 10 bitcoins next year will be worth more than 10 bitcoins are worth today.

2) If you had 10 bitcoins today, one of the things you could do is hold them and have 10 bitcoins next year.

3) If you had 10 bitcoins today, you could also do other things with them.

4) Thus 10 bitcoins next year is worth less than 10 bitcoins today. 10 bitcoins today includes the ability to have 10 bitcoins next year, but also allows you to do other things if you would prefer. So it must be at least as valuable as 10 bitcoins next year. (Less negligible 'holding costs'.)

5) Since long-term predictable deflation allows us to know something that is false, it cannot be.

The rest of your argument just starts out by assuming that Value(X)+Value(Y) < Value(X) where Value(Y) > 0, so it's not surprising you get silly results. Don't start out by assuming the impossible and you won't wind up with contradictions.

The major gain is 1, 4, and 5. Even well-implemented paper systems do nothing about 1 and 5. As for points of failure, paper systems have points of failure too. It's hard to handle paper in a redundant way like you can with data.

Why pay people to be brainless idiots when there are millions and millions of people who will be untiring brainless idiots all day long for free?