Bragging often consists in stating facts:

to talk with excessive pride about what one has, can do, or has done.

In Cyprus, people were deprived of something they thought belonged to them.  It is true in one sense, but false in an other.

I'm not sure what I am going to say describes the exact semantic difference between "property" and "ownership", but that is how I like to think about it anyway.  Even if I'm wrong about the words, the notions I'm about to talk about still exist and if the words are not correct, there should be other words because the notions are useful, thus they need words.

Anyway, what I want to say is that there is a fundamental difference between property and ownership.

As Thyrion Lannister puts it:  
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When you have some money on a bank account, this money is your property.  But you don't hold this money.  Your bank does.  It does it for you, on your name.  This means that only the bank has the capability to actually do anything with this money.  You only have the illusion that you have such a capability because the bank normally obeys you with this money whenever you request an operation.

Property is an abstract concept:  it's a word that describes some kind of legitimacy to enjoy ownership without necessarily owning the thing owned.

With euros, one way of both owning and having property on money is to own bank notes that have been acquired legitimately.   It's a bit more complex than that, but that's a good approximation.

But with electronic euros, there is no way, unless you are a bank, to own euros that are your property.

The Cyprus theft shows how fragile is the concept of property when it is not reinforced by ownership.   The money in your bank account is yours, but not as much as one might thought.

With bitcoins, the difference does exist as well:  if you trust a third-party wallet or exchange, you do not own the bitcoins that are supposed to be yours.  And just as in the Cyprus case, this property is fragile.

But the crucial difference with bitcoin is that it is the only electronic form of money that anyone can, if he wants to, actually own on his computer.  And that is a very important proof of concept for electronic finance.

A vu de nez je dirais que ça vaut le coup d'essayer; surtout compte tenu du fait que tu as accès à de l'électricité bon marché.

Ce qu'il faut que tu fasses surtout c'est mesurer le nombre de Hash que ton matériel est capable de calculer par seconde.   Divise par le coût de ton électricité et compare avec le résultat d'un calcul similaire obtenu avec les données concernant les ASIC (sûrement dispo quelque part).

Cela dit ça peut vite devenir compliqué:  le mieux c'est d'essayer.   Mais dans ce cas je te déconseille d'essayer en solo parce que si ton matériel est insuffisant tu ne t'en rendras compte que très tard et alors tu auras gaspillé pas mal d'électricité pour rien.   Donc si j'étais toi, je rejoindrais un pool, ce qui me permettrait de faire rapidement une estimation de ton rendement.  Si alors tu es convaincu que ton matériel est rentable, quitte le pool et mine en solo.

Attention je te donne ces conseils mais je n'ai jamais miné un seul bloc ni rejoint un pool.  Ce n'est donc pas un avis éclairé.

I have no idea if that is technically possible, but could a lightweight bitcoin client be integrated in a mastercard chip?

That's awesome.  Now I just wish this will have some success and actually be used.

Homomorphic Payment Addresses and the Pay-to-Contract Protocol

We propose an electronic payment protocol for typical customer-merchant relations which does not require a trusted (signed) payment descriptor to be sent from the merchant to the customer. Instead, the destination "account" number for the payment is solely created on the customer side. This eliminates the need for any encrypted or authenticated communication in the protocol and is secure even if the merchant's online infrastructure is compromised. Moreover, the payment transaction itself serves as a timestamped receipt for the customer. It proves what has been paid for and who received the funds, again without relying on any merchant signatures. In particular, funds and receipt are exchanged in a single atomic action. The asymmetric nature of the customer-merchant relation is crucial.
The protocol is specifically designed with bitcoin in mind as the underlying payment system. Thereby, it has the useful benefit that all transactions are public. However, the only essential requirement on the payment system is that "accounts" are arbitrary user-created keypairs of a cryptosystem whose keypairs enjoy a homomorphic property. All ElGamal-type cryptosystems have this feature. For use with bitcoin we propose the design of a deterministic bitcoin wallet whose addresses can be indexed by clear text strings.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.3257

Le problème c'est qu'avec Paypal il n'y a aucune guarantie pour celui qui te vendra les 30 BTC.

La méfiance ça marche dans les deux sens.

I spend a lot of time on phys.org and similar websites and I see many articles about various advancements in several fields.  I often wonder what kind of technological achievement is the most important for humanity.  

Here is a poll proposal to try to figure it out.

As far as I'm concerned, I voted for computing power because it is the key to further progress in other directions.  Computing power brings simulation of physical systems, thus ease development in engineering.  It is also one of the paths to artificial intelligence, which is the key to everything.

Sure, and there are literally hundreds of billions times even more in the whole Milky way.  But it does not matter:  what matters is the amount easily available.

The Oort cloud is extremely far away from us.   We will never bring anything from there.  (Or when we can, we will probably be so advanced that we won't value precious metals that much)

Lemme guess:  you would like a currency that everybody receives equally, at regular interval and till the ends of times?

Bitcoin is not just a currency:  it's a decentralized payment system.   That's no small feat!

With a bitcoin-like software, you can allow internet users to exchange account units, aka amounts of stuff, in a purely decentralised way.   This normally should blow the mind of anyone interested in finance.

Think stock exchange.   A decentralized, almost anonymous, 24/24, 7/7 stock market, with almost zero brokerage costs.  Wouldn't that be awesome?   A stock market that governments would be incapable of taxing?    Now try to think of all the diversity of financial instruments.  It's just the same.

If you don't think bitcoin is a good idea as a currency, you should at least acknowledge the fact that it is a proof that one does not need a centralized book keeper in order to transfer accounting values.  Not anymore.

I know they did.  Then why do you whine about a possible corner of bitcoin?

Je commence à regretter de ne pas pouvoir être présent.  L'actualité est vraiment chargée ce mois-ci donc ça risque d'être animée, cette rencontre.

You miss a lot.

Let's say I manage to buy ten million bitcoins.  Now, tell me: how exactly can I force you to wipe my shoes if you don't want to?  Nobody forces you to accept my bitcoins as a wage for your work!!

People could just say:  "this guy has gathered pretty much all the bitcoins.  Screw him, let's start an other chain from scratch!"

Imagine a group a people establishing on a deserted island, trying their best to survive and eventually actually doing more than survive.  They build a mini society with plenty of social interactions and so on.  At some point they'd need to reinvent  many of the things they were used to when they lived on the continent.  In particular, they'd have economic relations between one another and they re-invent money.  They'd use whatever was scarce on the island and pretty much useless and they used it as a token as a medium of indirect exchange.

Now, a sailor arrives in this island and he would find all this perfectly normal.  A group of people organizing each other in order to create their own currency.  Nothing new under the sun, right?


Now tell me:  why is it that for some people it is so much difficult to understand that with internet and the abolition of physical frontiers, such a concept can emerge again?  A group of people with similar cultural background, organizing each other and agreeing about some sort of a token to work as a currency?   Why is is different from the perfectly normal situation of a group of people in geographic isolation?

Also, the wealth of this person would existsonly because some people would be willing to offer goods and services for those satoshis.  Therefore talking about "anal slavery" is totally inappropriate.   A slave is someone who is forced to obey, not someone who willingly contributes to an economic exchange.

The OP should learn about what a corner is and how it is not as easy as one might think.

bitstamp.net,  bitcoin.de


Tu peux aussi demander à être contacté par message perso pour une transaction en vis-à-vis.

It might sound nice and cool to say that bitcoin is backed by economic freedom, but it's more rhetoric than anything.  Let's be practical, shall we?

Also, gold was a mean for economic freedom much before bitcoin.  Alan Greenspan himself wrote it long ago: http://constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm

This is not exact.  The physical properties of gold are not that great.  In ancient times, many other metals were much more useful, especially considering how strong metals and allows were important to forge weapons.  Gold is soft and pretty much useless in metallurgy.  After all, we talk about iron age, bronze age and all for a reason.  We don't talk about golden age, apart from figurative speech.

Gold indeed had useful properties, but precisely those properties made it ideal as a medium of exchange.  It's easy to make gold coins, gold is almost absolutely inert chemically, it's rare and it is easily distinguishable.  All this made it the best tool as money.  Not because it had amazing properties for non-monetary uses in the first place.  It just hadn't.