Ah. Good news.  

According to Kotlikoff (the economist interviewed here), the fiscal gap was $222 trillion in 2012.  It follows that the US is $12 trillion (42 billion bitcoins) better off than it was just a couple of years ago.  Nice job guys!

By the by: the term is "fiscal gap", not "deficit".  The fiscal gap is a measure of how broke the government is whereas the deficit is simply how much it's pissing away each year.  "Washington's $210 trillion deficit" is just plain wrong.

If the FED do create a crypto-currency then it will almost certainly...

• be managed with reference to a neo-Keynesian monetary policy.
• have anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations built right into the protocol.
• be intimately linked to the tax system to help catch "tax cheats".

Basically, it would be a less efficient, much less widely-used, and far less private version of the US dollar, a currency that Bitcoin has been competing with favourably for years.

A quick look at the examples on coingraffiti.info shows a rate of about 10 mills per kilobyte (0.01 BTC/kB) for the larger, block-like messages so you should be able to embed your file into the blockchain in chunks for about 50 BTC.  I don't know how efficient coingraffiti is but I'd guess that an equivalent service using OP_RETURN would be cheaper.

Do you believe that the market value of any given mining machine will drop sharply at the moment of the halving?

The cornerstone in any defense of authoritarian thinking is that a relatively wise person has a natural right to make decisions unilaterally on behalf of the fools about him.

The key problem with this line of reasoning is that wisdom and foolishness are ultimately decided subjectively.  It is very possible to have two humans, each assessing themselves to be wiser (or as you say "more mature") than the other.

Only a fool can believe himself to be sufficiently wise that he may rightly make decisions for others.

None that believe in ruling are fit to rule.

Those were the words of one Sepp Hasslberger, not Satoshi.

But has not Amy taken on as much risk as Wilson and Daniel combined?  Does whether or not she mentally sold her 20 000 bitcoins to herself 6 months ago change anything?

Do you debate this additive property or do you claim perhaps that Wilson has taken on negative risk?  Or something else entirely?



Good point.  Perhaps "easy come, easy go" plays a part in this common disagreement.  Perhaps there's a feeling that Amy's 20 000 bitcoins weren't truly earned.

Breaking probability itself through experiment is like trying to use a hammer to hit the very same hammer.  The logic which is used to connect the results of experiments to the assumptions of a hypothesis is, in part, probability.

The idea that something purely logical can be influenced by something physical ("some unknown cosmic law") is so far outside the box I'm having difficulty describing an approximate answer (just as you are having difficulty formulating an exact question).  Fortunately for us, a fine wordsmith has already given this topic some attention.  Look up "Infinite Improbability Drive" and "Bistromathematics".

Initially, they risked basically nothing.  The investment of time, effort, and electricity was done out of curiosity and/or to support a cool little project.  The bitcoins themselves were practically valueless.

However, an early user that held a stack of bitcoins for many years has absorbed a huge amount of investor risk.

Consider:
Amy, Wilson, and Daniel are bitcoiners:

• Amy mined 20 000 bitcoins in 2009 and held them until today.
• Wilson mined 20 000 bitcoins in 2009 and sold them 6 months ago.
• Daniel bought 20 000 bitcoins in the market 6 months ago and held them until today.

Which of Amy, Wilson, and Daniel has taken on the most risk?

Curious.  Are you suggesting that if you had a terminal illness and knew you would perish in short order that you would not worry about future wealth inequality?  Why does your belief that you'll be alive long from now affect how you feel right now about the future relative prosperity of others?

Not to my knowledge.  It seems to me that he intentionally avoided the subject.  The closest example I have is:


As he was defending his newly published whitepaper to a critical James Donald and a supporting Hal Finney, Satoshi responded to many comments but chose to ignore this comment from Hal on 2009-01-11:

I assume througout that there is no problem with mining and I ignore the subtleties of difficulty changes throughout.


No, this is not correct.  If you see that the last block was created 60 mins ago then the expected waiting time until the next block is 10 minutes and the expected length of time between the current block and the next block is 70 mins.


Good question.  You've stumbled into a probability paradox.

Consider also that the block-generating process looks exactly the same with time reversed.  If you select points in time uniformly (between 2010-01-01 and 2012-12-31 say) you'll find that the next block is, on average, 10 minutes into the future just as you find that the previous block is, on average, 10 minutes into the past.  You'll find that the average time interval between the previous and next blocks is indeed 20 minutes!


Resolving the paradox:
Selecting a block at random is different to selecting a point in time at random.  When selecting a point in time at random you're more likely to land between blocks which are far apart than blocks which are close together.  Your averages are then biased towards longer waiting times.

In a slightly earlier version of Satoshi's code (pre-genesis) the limit was 20 million bitcoins.  Blocks were set to arrive every 15 minutes with an initial subsidy of 100 BTC set to halve every 100`000 blocks (about 2 years and 10 months).

Certainly there was some thought put into the magnitude of the limit.  While Satoshi had 63-bits of space to play with (using signed 64-bit integers at the time) it seems possible that he intentionally confined bitcoin amounts to well within 53-bits so that amounts could be handled comfortably by the IEEE 754 binary64 datatype (potentially useful for JSON-RPC).

What we can be reasonably sure of is that the particular figure of 21 million arose simply as part of some last-minute tweaking and carries no deeper meaning.

Cool!

With a first glance I only see about 30.  I wonder what "1025" references or what the blue porcupine represents.

Why is it that Bitcoin Average registers a large spike on the USD, EUR, and CNY average charts just past midnight on the 27th of February where non of the exchanges that deal in these currencies have one?  Granted, there is a huge sudden rise just after 3am on this date, a rise all the major exchanges and Bitcoin Average agree upon, but the exchanges all report a lack of excitement at midnight.

Good.  When everyone has a positive reason to fund their government there is no need to force people to pay taxes.  Your country can make its taxes optional, effectively making them "suggested donations", and thereby eliminate some unnecessary bureaucracy.

This is why N-of-N multisig should be avoided.


Multisig works on both fronts.  You can, for example, arrange for there to be three passwords protecting funds such that any one password is useless but any two passwords give access.  This is called 2-of-3 multisig and is more common than the 3-of-3 multisig you describe above.

This can be done for any integers M and N with 1 <= M <= N.  Larger values of N are more complex.  When M is far from 1, theft is unlikely.  When M is far from N, loss is unlikely.

It's been possible for coming up to 2 years.

I've successfully used BTCTrip twice.  It's built up a decent reputation in this time.  Even Satoshi's given a testimonial!

A person choosing to pay taxes out of fear is precisely a person choosing not to commit the crime of tax evasion out of fear.

Far from being an isolated example, there are many laws which terrorise* the public into modified behaviour, laws which do not mirror what most consider good social behaviour, laws which do not directly concern "bringing damage to another human".  "crime" and "wrongdoing" are quite distinct notions.  "legality" and "morality" are poles apart.

*The word "terrorise" sounds loaded but I honestly just needed a verb to capture "force behaviour using the threat of violence" and I'm trying to use "coerce" less these days.

Great work as always.  I particularly appreciate the highly accessible source code (last night, GnuPG's source made me a very sad panda).

Any thoughts on BIP0039?  I'm not so worried as I've written the functionality I desire myself; I'm just curious.