The infrastructure needed depends on what you require as basic functionality. I can't buy design work from a guy in Hawaii for gold without a hell of a lot of infrastructure. 99.9999% of people are out of my reach in regards to trading using gold without any infrastructure.

Granted in the 0 infrastructure word gold still exists and Bitcoin kind of doesn't anymore. But for anything resembling the real world, Bitcoin infrastructure grows to exactly where you want it nearly instantly "Hey guy, download Bitcoin".

edit: I see you already said most of this.

    maybe up, maybe down         maybe stick it in my pants    
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hard choice (not really)

5 million yen doesn't buy what it used to, mtgoxlive is shit.

I'm totally getting out of my depth here, but I think it's all good because multi-sig has been built in all along. Your client might not be able to fully understand the requirements to spend those tx, but it doesn't matter, it can see that the inputs are greater than or equal to outputs.

edit: now I'm getting lost, won't users need to know if the right criteria has been met in order to tell if that tx can be a valid input in a later tx?

Bitcoin? How does it work?

It would be sufficient to get all headers and then fill in with only the full blocks that you actually need. The implementation might be a little bit complicated, but you won't have to trust your source still, you'll be able to check that the block has the required header, and so know that it fits. (I'm not 100% on this actually, someone please confirm.)

My understanding is that those BIPs can lead to miners accidentally making blocks that won't be accepted. Users don't need to get a new version.

So it's a black hole for demand somehow, but not supply?

It's obviously not a 'closed system' either. It doesn't have to pass everything somewhere else to not be closed, it has to pass anything ever to not be closed.

If I passed you a block in which I awarded myself a 100BTC reward for generation, you're client would just be like, "Lol, no. I don't care who else accepts that, I don't". Same thing if someone tries to give themselves 50BTC for block 210000.

Obviously your own non-mining client can tell what is and isn't an actual Bitcoin transaction, that's how you know you've been paid even before a tx gets in a block. The tx has to have a history that leads back to a valid generation, has to be signed correctly etc.

Depending on what rule changes you are talking about it doesn't matter if 95% of miners choose to switch to say 50BTC reward forever. The power is with the merchants to reject the false coins.

It is interesting (perhaps worrying) to consider how cheaply one could pick up a lot of mining power. If miners are somewhat narrow-mindedly interested in short-term gain they may sell their power for a small % over the coins they get. How many would mine empty blocks only if the pool gave a 10% bonus? If the pool got 50%+ it could decrease difficulty by ignoring others blocks and building only on it's own. I strongly believe enough miners would bail after all they want to actually send their coins right? But with soft totalitarian rules it could conceivably be a problem. For example, very high fees with fees returned to registered members somehow.

I don't think any of this is likely, just thinking aloud.

I <3 Gavin, but that's an odd choice of example. The encryption procedure didn't actually remove the unencrypted private keys when it was first released.

edit: <3 is a heart right? It's not in my normal vocabulary.

When there is law (and oh boy there is law) men are not free to act to solve their problems. Freedom is no guarantee, but in the current situation would be free actors are stopped at every turn.

If you could get people to make a huge change like moving to an expiring protocol then the whole point would be moot you could get them to switch to anything.

yeah, maybe you should open a site and lend money to people to buy coins. Also try never to run out no matter how much people want to borrow.

Is it a promise to reject any block contains a different transaction with the same inputs? That might leave the miner off the real chain forever no? But otherwise what does it matter? They'll mine the tx unless another gets in first? Not much help really.

The bottleneck in TOR is just that more nodes are needed? More of the special exit nodes specifically?

Can exit nodes be configured to only help customers who have signed with a certain key?

You might find as you grow that using SendMany will save you some fees. You might send every hour for example, sending 15 tx at a time for only about double the fee of sending one singly.

Coins aren't branded with signatures in some permanent way. There is no difference between sending coins by signing with one sig or with two. If you get sent coins that used to be encumbered by A or (B or C or D) or (D and E) it makes no difference, whatever the inputs were have no bearing on what the outputs can be.

In general though if the government passes a law requiring us to wear shoes on our heads it isn't safe to assume people will actually wear shoes on their heads.

You need something more convincing than "the government will tell us to hand our money over". Getting our gold money took generations, and now we have so many more advantages.

Can you do one huge bitcoin? Like 4x taller?

You have literally zero idea what you are talking about so Standard Transaction Federal Union.

Not positive feedback...

But seriously the gov can build up a good reputation too. Not that I think they are yet, and even when they do it'll probably be to watch and learn mostly.

Hitting random bitcoin users would be pretty lol. Are they going to admit it's some random bitcoin or TOR user? Hope people figure it out and get scared? Maybe messing with high profile users would matter some, but does that scare people really?