That's another tricky bit. You want to get high quality code, and one good criterion for that is the code getting accepted into mainline. But you don't want to punish someone for something outside of his control. That's another issue that's going to need thinking about.

I was thinking staged bounties. So many bitcoins for the first working implementation. So many for a high-quality implementation and a pull request. So many for getting the pull request into mainline. I'm not sure that's the best approach, but I do prefer to avoid overly-subjective criteria. I could imagine something like 50% earned immediately and 50% distributed after 30 days, including other contributors if appropriate.

Spell 'address' correctly.

That's that country where they wear funny hats, speak gibberish, and exchange colorful slips of paper instead of money? Like most Americans, I know it well.

You're shipping fish jerky made in Idaho from outside the US? What would shipping to the United States be?

First, use instead of &. Second, it shouldn't be necessary. I've never had an issue. When it's hung, what are the last few lines in your debug log? (The 'debug.log' file in your bitcoin data directory.)

What are you trying to connect to? What is your hash rate? And are you connecting through any kind of NAT or proxy?

My guess would be you have some kind of NAT device that is timing out 'inactive' connections.

It doesn't lose out due to anything. Precisely 100% of the energy that the machine uses becomes eat. Even the energy that goes to fans turns into kinetic energy of molecules, which is pretty much the definition of heat. The friction in the bearings, the current through the wires, it's all heat.

If you don't see why this must be, consider a computer locked inside a room. All that can pass into or out of the room is electricity (through wires) and heat (through the walls of the room). Now imagine we let the room sit until it reaches an equilibrium. All that is going into the room is electric energy and all that is leaving the room is heat. If you assume the conversion wasn't a perfect 100% electricity-to-heat, that would mean something would be either building up in the room or being depleted from the room. But that would contradict our assumption that we let the room sit until it reached an equilibrium.

Competition is a form of cooperation. Personal freedoms don't interfere with cooperation. If you're not free not to cooperate, it's not cooperation, it's predation. (Of course, there do have to be enforced rules. Your freedom stops at me.)

I honestly can't see how that could happen. If we have all these people whose needs are unsatisfied, how can there also be nothing to do?

The current unemployment is not caused by technology providing everything everyone could ever want without anyone needing to exercise any effort. If we ever had that 'problem' the solution would be simple -- you could live like a king on charity.

The unemployment we have now was caused by an atypical crisis. (And yes, even a perfect libertarian utopia could have such crises. Free markets don't make everything magically perfect.)

You know, I was thinking that it should be bitcoin only to promote bitcoin. But then it occurred to me, if bounties are paid in bitcoins, it will serve to get people interested in bitcoin regardless of what the bounty is for. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this though.

That's another issue that I'm not completely sure how I feel about. I'm a bit concerned that while decentralization will create a lesser risk of a large amount of projects funds being lost or stolen, I think it will create a greater risk of a smaller amount of funds being lost or stolen. I think I'd have to see (or work on) more detailed proposals.

I'm not sure I understand completely what you're asking, so I'll try to answer a few of the possible things you could mean.

First, I hope we agree that the optimum level of pollution isn't none at all. No pollution would mean we couldn't even breathe, lest the carbon dioxide we exhale worsen global warming. We couldn't even use fire to cook our food. And of course, the optimum level of pollution isn't as much as we can possibly create. There are all sorts of things we could do that, but for the pollution they'd produce, might be great ideas but when you factor in the pollution, are clear losers.

Now, it doesn't immediately follow that there is some perfect mathematically optimum level of pollution. Presumably, for any precisely defined X, there's a level that maximizes X, but we get a circularity when we try to figure out what the X should be. So, by optimum level of pollution, I mean the level of pollution that maximizes X, for the optimum value of X. I don't know precisely what X is, but I do know approximately. Health is good. Wealth is good. Disease is bad. And so on, but there is no universal metric.

One of the reasons we need a free market is because without one, we don't have any ability to compare things. If there were no exchanges, how many dollars is one bitcoin worth? Nobody could ever even have any clue. I mean optimum in the mix of everyone's weighted rational preferences.

Technology tends to reduce the optimum level of pollution. Once the optimum level of pollution included dumping sewage in the streets. Thanks to modern sanitation, that is now sub-optimum.

Yes, that's not precise. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

No. And that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing anyway since it's possible that the pollution level is below the ideal level. In fact, for people polluting their own property in ways that don't harm others, I suspect our society has pushed the pollution level well below the optimum level. I would expect a free market to fix that. Also, I would expect the reduction in public property leading to more land being polluted at a more optimal level (whether more or less). I also expect a free market to lead to improved technological and economic progress which will lead to reductions in the level of the really bad kind of pollution (negative externalities).

No offense intended, but I consider this idiotic "how do I know I exist" navel gazing.

After your last response, I have no idea what we disagree over, if anything.

I'm not sure I follow what you're asking. I'm saying that other than people polluting their own property, there is no reason to expect a free market to produce worse pollution than a regulated market. A free market does not mean freedom to pollute other people's property. People will tend to pollute their own property only when it is efficient for them to do so, and if not, who cares? Why should I care if you screw up something that's yours in a way that doesn't harm anyone else?

So I presume you never ever exceed the speed limit? In fact, I presume you never drive at all, after all, there's a risk of an accident. You ignore the fact that everything is a tradeoff.

If everyone wants BTC, then your price for BTC is too low. Raise the price until half the people want BTC and half the people want USD.

We have to balance having better cars, which is a plus, against more illnesses, which is a minus. If, on net, the plus exceeds the minus, it's progress. If the minus exceeds the plus, it's not. If the pluses and minuses are incomparable or incommensurate then either we can't tell if it's progress or not or it's not progress.

But this is yet another nitpick that has nothing to do with the issue. You know what I mean by progress. Why do you pretend you don't? Why do you refuse to engage on the actual issues yet pretend you've found some refutation or weakness?

If you're trying to point out that my argument is circular, for example (that I've defined progress to mean less pollution unless that's balanced out by something better and therefore of course more progress means less pollution), why not just say that?

If that was your point, my response would be that while specific instances of progress may mean more pollution, overall continuous progress will lead to less pollution. Just as "pollution" once meant raw sewage in the streets that would kill people by the thousands (and still does in places that haven't made much technological and economic progress) but now means microscopic quantities that may take a year off your expected lifespan.

And, again, the ideal amount of pollution is not zero.

Who lost funds during the hack and wasn't reimbursed? My impression that the only people who weren't reimbursed were those who gained funds due to the hack.

Yes, completely unclear and logically fallacious. If I said "I never lie unless my life is threatened", that is completely consistent with "I never lie". (Both because my life may never have been or may never be threatened and because lying when your life is threatened isn't 'really' lying because it doesn't cause the harm that lying normally causes.)
I don't know what's unclear. Nothing about a free market makes pollution worse with the exception of people being able to pollute their own property when that doesn't harm others. I submit that if this is unclear to you, it's because you are intentionally trying not to understand it.

If you know of some other way a free market might make pollution worse, do tell. If you want to talk about whether allowing people to pollute their own property when it doesn't harm anyone else is good or bad, we can do that. Otherwise, I don't know how I can be any clearer than I've been. Zero pollution is not the optimum level of pollution. Making some pollution worse is not a bad thing if the pollution level was below the optimum level previously.


I can't imagine why this matters to you. Are you honestly saying that you don't know what I mean by prosperity? You don't understand what wealth and progress are? Why these nitpicks? What possible relevance does it have? I don't understand why you want me to jump through all these odd hoops. Do you honestly not know what I mean? Or are you one of those people who insist that we can't talk about "intelligence" until we can precisely define it and come up with units for it?

Right. So putting money into an exchange has a cost -- the money may get stuck there. To commit to an exchange, I'd like as much information as possible. You give me much less than other exchanges do. So how do you make up that loss to me?

The difference is that I'll have less information at your exchange. Information always reduces risk, so less information means more risk. Again, how do you make that up to me? What do I get at your exchange in return for being more blind?

You're asking me why I didn't make an additional claim that you don't think is true? It's hard to figure out your point because you've concealed it behind a nitpick at my grammar.

Material wealth. Technological progress.

It is better than "to hook a mantissa" or "ask a homo station". But is it as good as "so a tomato has ink", "oat is a monk's oath", "to smash into a oak" or "shoot at oak mains"?