Again, if that's your position, we have no disagreement. If you think those terms are ambiguous or unclear, then you aren't the person I have a quarrel with. The person I have a quarrel with is the person who claims it's clear that a free market will make pollution worse. If you don't think that's a well-formed claim, then you and I are on the same side. It's madness for us to argue over whether or not a position is well-formed when nobody is taking that position. It's crazy for me to precisely define a position with which I disagree -- let someone who holds the position do that.

However, I will add your argument to my arsenal. The next time someone claims a free market makes pollution worse, I'll just insist they precisely define "pollution" and "worse" and they'll probably get so annoyed and frustrated they drop their claim and then I can claim I won! Won't that be a fine day!

I love techniques that allow me to avoid actual substantive arguments. This one is almost as good as "That's what you think!"

Personal savings and checking accounts at major banks have been FDIC insured continuously for decades. I'm not sure who told you otherwise or why. Perhaps they were talking about something other than checking or savings accounts.

        ch := (e and f) xor ((not e) and g)

The 'not' operation is bitwise negation. Every 1 bit becomes a zero, every zero becomes a one.

I don't see how it's setting anything up for a bad situation. In any event, what you're suggesting is happening anyway. People are running several different version of the client and upgrades do not happen instantaneously. There is no conceivable way such an attack could work until the majority of people were running an upgraded client, and there would be no way to induce the majority of people to upgrade to a client that destroyed the entire point of bitcoins.

The attack is just not feasible. If the Firefox team started making Firefox unusable, you wouldn't switch to Internet Explorer. You'd stick with the last unbroken version of Firefox until someone else took over the project and made a release you found better than the one you were using.

The people who control the official client only do so because they have earned trust. Any hint that that trust was betrayed and they would lose control over the official client.

That said, alternate client implementations are actually not a very good idea, IMO. Any slight incompatibility that caused a block to be accepted by one set of clients and not another could fork the public chain and lead to serious pain. (Imagine if one client said I paid you 100 bitcoins and another client said I paid someone else. However that's resolved, somebody won't be happy.) That's a pretty high risk for very little benefit. (I might be persuaded otherwise if there was some significant benefit, but I don't know of any. Obviously, it's a cost/benefit analysis and the cost is high.)

Most likely because he either needs to promote a pool or he's not mining bitcoins.

The attack you are suggesting is virtually impossible. What motive would people have for accepting a client that was rigged in such a way, particularly if the utility of bitcoin for them was harmed by such a choice? All that would happen if the developers did that is that their client version would quickly cease to be the official one.

And nothing stops anyone from writing their own client. So long as it follows the same network protocol, nobody need even ever know.

If any early adopter dumps all their coins on the market at once, the value of your bitcoins it at risk. That's about the worst they can do, unless they're evil geniuses of some kind that come up the kind of brilliant scheme that only works in movies.

An example of such a 'movie plot' attack would be to abduct the people who control the forums and the release of the client, create a fake urgent bug report using fake forum posts from many well-known forum users, and induce most of the network to upgrade to the latest version of the client. Somehow, you'd have to stop people from noticing and finding other ways to get out the word. And then use the tampered client to pay for everything you possibly could in fake coins, cleaning out all the exchanges. (In case it isn't obvious, I don't think such an attack could ever pay off enough to cover the costs of launching it.)

If you do not have the affirmative belief that a free market will make pollution worse, then I have no quarrel with you. All I'm saying is that such a belief is unjustified. It seems to me that you do not have that belief and, better, have found another way to make my argument -- the notion of "worse" pollution is incoherent or too confusing to use. Great, I'll accept that as another way to make my point.

If you don't know what 'optimum' could mean, you can't possibly believe that a free market could make pollution worse. Worse would have to mean further from optimum. So we already agree on the only point I was trying to make.

No, there isn't. Coins are never sent from an address, only to an address. Some of the coins in a transaction may have been claimed by particular addresses, but that is not a requirement, nor need a transaction have only one address used to claim the coins used in it. For example, I could mine a block and send your address the 50 coins I get for mining it. What's the "from" address in that case?

Middle of that page, middle of the pseudo-code, starting from "Initialize hash value for this chunk" and going on until "Add this chunk's result to the hash so far". Basically, it just does a bunch of bitwise operations to 'mash' all the data into the running hash total.

There really isn't one. The only safe way is to get the sender to tell you where he wants the coins returned. There are many ways a person may send you coins from an address on which he cannot receive coins.

You may not understand the time value of money, but if an exchange doesn't, I'd find another exchange.

It's even worse if he doesn't! Suppose some mobsters figured out who Satoshi Nakamoto was. They kidnap him and demand he tell them the private keys to his millions of bitcoins. If he doesn't have any such private keys, he's in even worse shape than if he does. He has no way to get them to put the rubber hose away.

I'm thinking hack the client to send the change back to the same address, since we don't want any anonymity. That way, only the private keys to the fixed addresses are ever needed. I just use the 2/3->3 method to protect those.

One more: 3) They fear for their physical safety if it's known that they control millions of dollars in untraceable assets.

The thing is, they may or may not change that. They may say that's an obvious bug and change it. Or they may say that's the way it's supposed to be, and all coins after MAX_MONEY will fail in strange ways. We don't know.

This is like saying the solution to crime is more private security and burglar alarms. Sure, that helps, but only because we don't have *real* solutions.
You're inventing solutions based on technology that doesn't exist anyway. So why not invent good ones rather than mediocre ones?

Exactly. When you're on a Facebook page, for example, you are constantly sending queries to Facebook. Those queries, generated by Javascript authored by Facebook. How often they send queries and how big those queries are is completely under Facebook's control. Currently, their incentive is to be efficient to minimize the amount of data they have to handle. But they have tons of inbound bandwidth to spare, so if they got paid for people uploading, their incentive would go 100% the other way.

 
I don't agree. Damage less minimal compensation after the fact that is not tied to the amount of damage can be *much* worse. This jibes with common sense (how can you complain about attacks when someone is paying you for taking them?) and with experience.

A good example is a day care center that had a huge problem with late pickups. That meant an employee had to stay late, and none of their employees wanted to do that. So they had an idea -- make people pay $5/minute for late pickups. Guess what -- late pickups shot through the roof. Why? Because with this system, people now felt they had a right to make late pickups and weren't working so hard to avoid the inconvenience. They quickly got rid of the penalty.

Then allow us to push filters up the router chain.

I assume you take the same stand on banks and credit cards, right?