There's a huge incentive to distort the science when universal acceptance of global warming means a coercive government will place onerous restrictions on people. There is no incentive to distort the science when universal acceptance of global warming does not mean widespread economy-killing coercion.

So, on the "head in the sand" front, a Libertarian society would have huge advantages over ones like ours.

If he promises not to hop polls that have an explicit prohibition on pool hopping, I'd say your responsibility is sufficiently indirect that you're not a bad person if you allow him to do it. You are perfectly justified in saying "no" if he doesn't promise to stick to only pools that explicitly allow hopping though.

To point a person towards the concept that a word names.

Coming from someone who doesn't understand the purpose of definitions, that's almost a compliment.

They didn't. Personal checking and savings accounts have been continuously insured by the FDIC without interruption for decades. It's also not clear *who* is being accused of lying exactly.

You're focusing on something that isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not you can spend your coins by any method. The reason for the backup is to make it *possible* for you to recover your coins.

Is dropping $100 bill on your floor as bad as having it burned to bits? No. The former is easily recoverable. The latter is fatal.

You are focusing on an irrelevant detail. What matters is whether it's possible for you to recover the coins. The cosmetic issue of whether it takes an extra step or two is minor.

A backup wallet backs up your keys. With your keys, you can spend your coins. You are not screwed, and that's what is important.

I think his point is that people will continue to use the same receiving address even after they've transferred some coins from it, leaving some coins at their known account and some at various accounts unknown to them. This makes it very hard for human beings to know what they need to protect in order to be assured of not losing their coins.

The technique is only appropriate for holding coins to be transferred whole. Once the coins are claimed, they are no longer stored in a "mental wallet", period.

Negligible in absolute terms but not in relative terms. If you double the size of your lottery pool, your chances of winning millions doubles. In absolute terms, it increased by something like .0004%. In relative terms, it increased by 100%.

Okay, answer my question directly: If everyone on the planet believed that torturing children for pleasure was moral, would that make it moral to torture children for pleasure?

That's a non-sequiter. I never said it was unvarying or unchanging. I was talking about what it is, not what it was or would be.

Non-sequiter. You have to address what I actually said, not some generalized version of that you can pretend you think I agree with. (Of course, I don't. It's like pretending that because I believe 3 plus 2 is 5, I believe that any number plus 2 is 5.)

I said that if you really believed that torturing children for pleasure would actually be moral just because people believed it was, then you were a monster. There are actually a few other possibilities, which I'll mention her just to be complete:

1) You are lying. You know that torturing children for pleasure is immoral no matter what people believe.

2) You have some secret deceptive "out". For example, you are reasoning "a false proposition implies any proposition" or "so much would have to change for people to not believe torturing children for pleasure is immoral that perhaps the facts underlying that piece of morality would change as well" or some such.

The incoherency is that you are saying there are no facts and then when challenged to explain it, you cite a bunch of facts. Sure, people would have a hard time thinking of the facts that explain their response. At one time, people had no idea what facts accounted for the sky appearing blue, but that doesn't mean there weren't such facts or that the sky looked whatever color people said it looked.

Of course I believe there's a biological basis for morality. I've been saying all along that morality has a factual basis. (Biology, in case you didn't realize this, consists entirely of facts.)

I'm not sure why you think I'm bringing religion into it. Perhaps you forgot that you were the one claiming that morality was not based on facts.

It's hard to be polite when you can say something so stupid and so insultingly at the same time, but I will do my best. Yes, instincts don't require conscious comprehension of facts. But that doesn't mean instinctive responses aren't purely fact based. Our instincts are responses to sensory data, which originates from facts about the world around us and gets to our body through a causal chain that is entirely factual. We respond in the way we do because of facts about how we are constructed. An instinctive response is not random. It is not magical. It is the end result of a cause and effect chain and the facts of the world that input that chain and form the links of that chain. Yes, it does not require conscious comprehension of facts. But so what?

Color vision doesn't require conscious comprehension of facts. Is the sky whatever color people say it is? Is the sky and the grass the same color if people only say so? Or is the sky blue because of facts about Rayleigh scattering? And do the sky and grass appear different colors because of facts about their composition, how human color vision works, and so on?

So if everyone on the planet decided that slavery was moral, that would make it so? If everyone decided that torturing children for pleasure was moral, that would make it so?

Bluntly, I don't believe that you really believe this. But on the off chance that you really do, you are a monster.

I could explain why you are wrong, but it would take many pages and is way beyond the scope of this forum. But for here, suffice it to say that it is clear to me that you are lying. You are like the person who insists the sky does not look blue to them under normal day conditions. If it really doesn't, then you are broken in some way. But more likely, you are just lying because you think I cannot prove the sky looks blue.

Then why do people largely agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral? Magic? Coincidence?

What you're saying is completely incoherent. I honestly have no idea how to respond to it because it's so nonsensical. The best I can do to point you towards common sense is to ask you -- instinctive response to what? (Hint: facts.)

Why do you think all these people have the same instinctive response? Coincidence? Magic? If not facts, what else is there?

This is not the best forum to go into the theory of ethics on, but that's a load of nonsense. Even the most clearly objective facts (such as that the Earth is closer to round than flat) are not universally agreed upon. That doesn't make the Earth's shape only opinion. When people largely agree on things, more interesting than the fact that they agree are the facts that cause them to agree. For example, people largely agree that the Earth is closer to round than flat because of some specific facts -- specifically, that the Earth is in fact round.

The agreement is entirely superfluous. If there is an agreement, it's the fact that underlie that agreement that are important. (Otherwise, the agreement is entirely coincidental and of no value whatsoever.) And if the facts justify whatever it is that people agree on, it doesn't particularly matter than they happen to agree on it as well.

Across cultures, people almost universally agree that torturing children for pleasure is immoral. That's interesting, but if torturing children for pleasure is immoral, it's not the fact that people largely agree on it that makes it so. Whatever facts lead people to agree on it would also lead to it being in fact immoral. These facts are identifiable and testable. We do not need to resort to "belief makes it so".

That's why we have the doctrine of implied agreements and covenants of good faith. Otherwise, we'd have to make perfect written agreements before we could cooperate, and that would be extremely inconvenient. Your argument that there would be a written contract that covers this makes my point -- if a written contract would cover it, and there's no written contract, then it's covered by the implied agreement. The whole purpose of implied agreements is to eliminate the necessity of written contracts.

There's no lack of law or contract. Implied agreements and covenants of good faith and fair dealing are certainly part of law. And as for there being no contract, whenever people cooperate economically with expectations, there's a contract.

I agree.

I've already explained this to you many, many times. Whenever people agree to economic cooperation, there's a contract. It can be written, verbal, implied, or a bit of each. Again, you are being blatantly anti-social when you say "I can take advantage of others however I want, I didn't sign an agreement not to". That's not how civil society works, and you wouldn't want to live in such a society. You couldn't do anything without a written agreement, and you'd need to hire perfect lawyers to go over that contract, lest it contain a hidden clause that deprives you of the expected benefit. To argue that we actually live that way is crazy. We don't need "bitcoin mining laws" because we have a law of contract that has been developed over centuries, and it doesn't all go away just because bitcoins are new.

This again shows the anti-social nature and absurdity of the arguments used by those who defend pool hoppers. They insist that their only obligations, legal or moral, are to comply with signed contracts. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, and thankfully, I don't.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_about.htm says "The Federal Reserve Banks provide the Fedwire Funds Service, a real-time gross settlement system that enables participants to initiate funds transfer that are immediate, final, and irrevocable once processed."

I already addressed this in several places, with the example of the person who joins a coal mining cooperative right as they uncover a vein with the intention of leaving as soon as they have to search for the next vein.

Feel free to address the argument if you like, but please stop denying it exists. I'll repeat it one more time:

Say coal miners have a cooperative where they share in the profits. A miner joins the cooperative just as they uncover a rich vein. He stays in during the easy mining, getting a share of the profits from that vein. Just as the vein is exhausted and the other miners are settling in for the hard work of exposing a new vein, he leaves them to join another cooperative that has just unearthed a rich vein. This was his plan from the beginning, and he gets a disproportionate share of the benefits relative to the amount of mining he does at the expense of the other miners.

1) Is this unethical?

2) Does it breach the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing between the miners in the cooperative?

3) If you answered "yes" to 1 or 2, how is pool hopping different?

This is typical. The people who defend pool hopping deny that there's such a thing as an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and argue that only written rules apply to them. They claim people have no obligation to deal fairly with others and that they can make agreements in bad faith and if other people don't like it, well that's just their hurt feelings.

Well, that's not the way society works, and that's not the law. Please actually read this until you understand it:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/implied+covenant+of+good+faith+and+fair+dealing

It has to be this way. Otherwise, lawyers would get phenomenally rich as every agreement in life would require a written contract and a single shifty sentence snuck in by one party could completely deprive the other party of the intended benefit. Agreements simply don't work that way.

This not wishful thinking or hurt feelings, it's how the real world actually works. It's "if I didn't sign it, I don't have to comply with it" that's absurd wishful thinking and in complete disagreement with how the real world, and real society, actually works.

The anti-social nature of these arguments reflects the anti-social nature of pool hopping.

Not exactly, but its hash is.

No, stolen blocks submitted to anything but the entity that issued them are useless. You can verify that they are valid proofs of work (by confirming the hash), but you lack the information needed to submit the block to the network (because you don't have the transaction set, coinbase, and so on).

It is conceivable that with diligent effort, one could perfectly re-create the block, guessing which transactions were in it and so on. But then the block would be identical and would still pay to whoever the work issuer intended it to pay.

I can 100% confirm this. Otherwise, the entire bitcoin security system would fail horribly. If there was any way to change who got paid for a block after the work was completed, the proof of work would fail to prove work, its sole purpose. The whole point of the proof of work is to secure the block.

Yeah, so buy asteroid insurance.

In most cryptosystems, there are a finite number of keys and it is always possible that someone might guess your key by pure luck. The solution is always to ensure that the number of possible keys is high enough that this need not be worried about. AES-128 is considered good enough for government work, and it "only" has 10^40 possible keys. 10^48 is more than enough.

It is billions of times more likely that some astronomical event will obliterate the Earth and destroy your bitcoins.