explain it like your 5..

normally money is stored in a computer located in one place, the bank you first registered your identity information to.
although you can view your balance at many banks and ATM's and withdraw from them. your money is stored in one computer and simply sends balance or accepted withdraw requests from your bank to the destined ATM. the ATM does not store the balances of any/all bank accounts. this is called centralised.

however bitcoin has no single computer of storage, everyone using bitcoin has a copy of your balance, along with everyone elses balance.

imagine it like a special ATM in your house that DOES has a copy of everyones banking details on it and all the ATM's talk to eachother without a bank at the center. and they are all secured using a very very long password so that you cant take other peoples money and they cannot take yours without knowing this password.

using this long password you can do what you want with your money and the ATM's talk to each other so that they all get an updated copy of everyones balance. it does take about 10 minutes to confirm to the majority of ATM's that your balance change is correct and not an error/duplicate transaction.

if you made your own alterations to your ATM. and told everyone on this forum, advertised it on TV and everyone seen that your ATM was actually better then the satoshi dev team's version then just by telling people where to get hold of your version would make you become the dominant ATM being used. (if they chose to that is)

it is a freedom of choice for anyone to make, there is no power to prevent any user from not using the satoshi version, your version or any other persona version. its all about individuals choice. there is no leader to decide for you.

you may however find some smart people that see problems with your ATM and explain it to the community whom may not realise such problems exist.

this is the beauty of open source and decentralisation.

in a previous thread i mentioned that donating to the international HQ of red cross would mean alot of wasted funds dont reach Philippines. but i must emphasise that i mean the HQ bank account as oppose to the more local Philippine office bank account of red cross.

that being said i hope that Dabs has some insight into the local charities more involved in the front line supplies distribution, rather then the publicised fundraisers

DEC.............................

oh no, no no no..

DEC is not a front line charity. they are a fundraising "service" which them after taking a cut of the funds earned. they then pass funds onto these charities (named as "our member agencies")
Save the Children, British Red Cross, World Vision, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Concern, Oxfam, Plan UK, CARE International, Age International, ActionAid, Merlin, Teafund.

in the UK i have seen them advertising "fundraising" jobs in newspapers, jobcentres and other media, paying each fundraiser £250 a week + commission. to me i see DEC as an expensive middleman

as with this latest emergency(Philippine) and other emergencies(Haiti) in the past DEC has not been the guys that buy food, water, blankets or anything directly. what they do though is they fundraise and when a disaster strikes they remotely assess the needs of that area via data gathered from the news or its member agencies

just read how they work: http://www.dec.org.uk/about-dec/how-we-work
(short version)
the front line workers of its "member agencies" have to request funds from DEC, and DEC have to decide if the disaster is big enough to warrent large scale funding on one go, small funding periodically or if the disaster is not of certain scale, no funding at all.

and as it says here of the funds they pass onto member agents, they ensure  between 50-60% get to where its needed on the frontline http://www.dec.org.uk/about-dec/how-we-spend-your-money
(short version)
using hait as an example, in total they got £380mill but only £107mill was actually spent on frontline emergency supplies. (meaning only 30% of your donations to DEC would get to the victims)

now, then if someone was organising a bitcoin fundraising appeal, they should be in contact with the frontline guys and give them funds directly. cutting out the middle man.

im hoping Dabs is trying to get contact information for the frontline volunteers of the rescue kit distributors so that the money gets to the people needed faster and most cost effectively

beauty of bitcoin, anything is possible

Could rapid price appreciation prevent Bitcoin's success?

or

Bitcoin's success is the rapid price appreciation

+1

donating to red cross HQ = only 10% reaching the front line. they fundraised  about 200million last year,
75 million pounds goes towards "Staff emoluments and trustee expenses" (staff wages)
10 million pounds goes towards central office costs (bills, HR, legal)
70 million pounds goes towards generating income (advertising, PR, promotional materials)

in the end less then 10mill per project ended up on the front line (EG a project such as haiti)

so i prefer the funds find their way to the local regional departments or the frontline suppliers/distributors more direct. so i hope dabs can research into blanket companies, food, water companies that can supply and deliver the actual stuff, like i said the local PH bank of red cross is better then the international bank account, but still not as good as getting it to the "rescue kit" suppliers

translation
dont own your own bitcoins use a third party service that can take the coins..

i personally would say for those people that get bitcoins as a wage and spend them on foodler.com and bitcoinstore, meaning the "consumer" class of people, then yes using third party services for weekly amounts is acceptable.

but for investors and long term savers i would say using the proper client with full blockchain and understanding the best practices of backing up and paper wallet funds long term is advantageous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApJQayATWlM

heres a short clip of the episode. although i do not think this one episode caused the surge..

checking historic charts snce april there has been a pattern of a huge growth, leading to a drop at the start of the month (first week of EVERY month) then followed by 3 weeks of slower upward movement.

so this week is just part of that same pattern

ok lets say the government have cloned the data on a drugs website. they see that  an anonymous seller that has not listed his home location address but has withdrawn funds to address 1XTr45ecr3tAddr355BlahBlahBlah

the government can simply google search:
1XTr45ecr3tAddr355BlahBlahBlah
 and see where it "might" have been published on a forum, a website, an email that is not Tor protected.. or even in your phone metadata (yes they can search this too)

so if you use the same address linked to other usernames or cellphone data they can get you, or atleast expand on searchable phrases to narrow down on you.

if you then put the funds from the drugs site withdrawal into a known exchange deposit address or an known amazon/retail deposit address. they can try seizing personal Identification from these companies.

the thing about bitcoin is that its your money and your address.. no one is forcing you for information linked to every address you use. so if you hide it well and not link your identity to it you can hide..

just like bank notes. there are not very many places that will ask you for ID so if you avoid using a banknote with a tainted serial number in a place that asks for your ID. no one will know.

i do like these video's but the summation of predicted size of the blockchain in 2016 is a little over the top.
i remember that as of spring 2012 i had to download 8GB of blockchain data. 18 months later it is 11GB so that is only 3GB increase this year...

I am not sure how you even came to the 1.3 Terrabytes total. to get to that figure each block would need to be a fully packed to the top, filled with transactions 25mb block size limit
25x6 =150MB each hour
144x 24 hours=3.6GB each day
3600x365 days=1.3TB each year

i think you are presuming the block limit for 2014-2015 will be lifted to 5mb and 2015-2016 will be lifted to 20mb and that is totally on the presumption that EVERY block has 100% utilisation of transactions filling up 100% of each block to require such a huge jump.

so here goes, a more accurate (yet still guessed) increase of the blockchain size per year

so far 2013: the maximum size of a block is 1MB, there are 6 blocks per hour (1 per 10 minute average) 24 hours in a day 365.. = 52,560GB MAXIMUM chain increase size per year if 100% utilised.
meaning in 2 years (2016) it will be under an 8th of a terrabyte(125GB) if each block was totally 100% filled to the 1mb per block size.

so far the 2009-2012 have shown small amount of transactions which dont utilise the full 1MB space per block, even in 2013 on average only a 5th-8th (12%-20%)of a 1MB block gets utilised meaning the total blockchain for 4 years of running is only 11gb, not hundreds of gigabytes.

so lets pretend transactions atleast doubled next year on average(lets say moved from the 12-20% upto 33% block fill) there maybe another 17GB added to the blockchain totalling 29GB for 2014-2015. and each block still has space per block.

again another year passes and transactions increase double fold equalling 35GB for the 2015-2016 or 64GB for the 2009-2015 total, again still room in the block for more transactions.

i do not think that it will be terrabytes of data, because somehow, somewhere you got the 5fold increase figure, and then used this against the presumption of 100% filled blocks.

now the knit pick is over. you do have potential as a presenter, but its still worth you double checking your figures and research before posting videos or your credibility will slowly decline

i personally do not donate to the red cross, this is because of a few things
EG (numbers are from their financial reports available on their website)
75 million pounds goes towards "Staff emoluments and trustee expenses"
10 million pounds goes towards central office costs (bills, HR, legal)
70 million pounds goes towards generating income (advertising, PR, promotional materials)

and then when you look at how much was spent per cause, under £10 million was spent each on the japan, haiti and other disaster responses.

would you want to give red cross a bitcoin worth $340 and know that less then $25 of supplies/support ended up at the frontline for victims?

id prefer to ensure the maximum amount of funds reached the destined victims and also highlighting the fact that those supplies/support was funded via bitcoins. thus id prefer giving to someone from the area that can show 'front line' results of the bitcoin donations.

sidenote to OP:

by simply putting your paypal into red cross while you collect the bitcoins, is not advertising bitcoins as a charitable event, its more of a middleman effort to start off with paypal and end up with bitcoins, where you are in control of the exchange rate and a small side effect of charity donations

bitcoin doesnt need it. but if your wanting to swap FIAT for bitcoin at any point then it does need some government approval.

if you dont want this then stop working for a business that pays salary in FIAT, stop going to FIAT acceptig shops/stores to buy food/clothes and dont fill your car up at FIAT priced gas stations. instead find the bitcoin alternatives and you will never need to worry about government regulations affecting you directly.. even though regulations will still affect the merchants you deal with, if they have to convert to FIAT, so theres no way to prevent regulations, there is only ways to limit how much it extends to you and affects you directly

video's of patrick so people know his 'style' and get to know him more then just a name

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMC-oSoaOcY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWLgSHHFaI0 - one minute - 05 seconds into video

relax guys its the first week of the month... check out chart history.. well ill save you time each month the price tries to steadily rise and then does a silly large rise, followed by a drop and within a few minutes or days recovers to a new monthly high...

check out these dates for when the month's lowest price occured.
16-Apr $50
03-May $79
09-Jun $88
05-Jul $65
08-Aug $100
06-Sep $121
02-Oct $109

notice something.. they are all in the first week of the month. this is what i call the Salary week. where every hoarder decides its time to play around with their funds..

so relax, its never a death of the coin its just a couple days worth of adjustment which since april as always moved in an upward direction..

ANiceJewishBoy

you have been -outted -

its Finshaggy using one of his sock puppet names

ANiceJewishBoy

you have been -outted -

its Finshaggy using one of his sock puppet names

so what is the work-around to fix this, so that the victims are not forced to pay into this scam and then treating bitcoin as a criminal preferred coin. if we as a community help out the victims by solving their woes they wont need to pay into it and think of bitcoin as a bad thing.

secondly this address that the funds get paid into could simply be a mtgox, bitstamp, btc-e deposit address. because once its in an exchange the funds just get split up for other users who are withdrawing.

we don't want criminals tainting the coins, i definitely don't want to withdraw my coins from an exchange and realise they are linked to the deposits of this scammer using the same exchange.

getting a confirmation is normally only needed between 2 people who do not fully trust each other, this is to make sure the sender does not send the coin and then also send the exact same balance back to himself, causing the amount sent to the other party becoming void.

if you are doing a transaction to a friend and he knows you well enough to not cheat him, or at least knows you well enough to know where to go to slap you across the face with a wet fish if you did cheat him. then you wont have to worry about confirmations

miners should never only accept paid transactions EVER, but it appears that they are.

what they should do is first fill up the block with the paid transactions (prioritise) and then fill the rest of the block with free transactions waiting.

i repeat the should never only fill blocks with paid transactions.

that is selfish and does not help the overall usefulness of bitcoin. this is especially the case as the total fee's per block doesn't add up to much anyway, fee's are not really a big and noticeable bonus to the reward. so whether a transaction has a fee or not the end "reward" pot doesn't change.

take for instance
http://blockchain.info/block-index/438690/0000000000000006f53d92ffea0a2ca3f81763319b5f51498b56d60a85d25fa2
105 transactions
only 53k out of 1mb block size!!
and the end result is 0.0122101 BTC fee bonus

what makes me laugh is that the pool owner takes more of profits from all its miners then the transaction fee gives the pool. this means none of the miners ever get a bonus, above 25BTC to share between themselves.

SO MINERS, VOTE AND ENCOURAGE YOUR POOL OWNER TO FILL THE BLOCKS UP

learn to read...

second market DO NOT OWN BIT they only sponsor it.

so doing a who-is on secondmarket is futile as they are not the legal owners of your money you invest..

you are meant to look for who the OWNERS of BIT are. the legally identifable owners, so that when the crap hits the fan you know who to sue.

you cannot sue second market, as they have clearly said they are only sponsors.. not owners..

so before you invest.. find out who is the owner...

http://who.is/whois/http://www.bitcointrust.co

the domain is registered through go-daddy and the IP address of the server is going through a linode VPS.

for a legitimate OWNER asking for high value customers, hiding away their identity is fishy..