Because the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I find this kind of debate amusing.  The question about whether or not global warming is caused by human industrial activities or not is an irrelevent one with regards to the outcomes.  Either an increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophic warming or it will not, that is the only detail that matters.  So I ask the partisans on this thread the following questions...

Where did the carbon encased into fossil fuels come from?  My understanding is that they originally came from dead plant material, but if so, where did the plants get it?  The obvious answer is the air, but I'm open to speculation about alternatives.  If the carbon came from the air, and we presently live on this planet, how could a closed carbon cycle with a finite amount of carbon in it possibly cause a catastrophic warming trend when it didn't do that when the plants were alive?

So far, I've posed this same quandry to a great many people that I have met, and the most credible alternative that I've yet been presented with came from a fundamentalist Christian conservative, who responded that the carbon wasn't in the air before because God created the Earth with the oil in the ground.  I've literally seen dyed-in-the-wool tree huggers distort their own faces with the cognative dissonance.

I can see how that might be upsetting.

Since you are in the know, do you mind explaining what advantages you think that Solidcoin has over Bitcoin?

It would be a fine way for that very same coffe shop to provide customer internet, but most of around here do that already for free.  Even McDonald's around here offer free wifi, even though it's throttled.  I leave my home wifi open by default, on purpose.  If anyone is outside downloading p0rn, I've reduced transmitter power so that they would literallly have to stand on my lawn to do it; but my neighbors could use my signal if they needed to, just as I have used theirs in the past when my router was down.

Offline mobile to mobile bitcoin transactions have a real use case, particularly in the event of a widespread service outage, say caused by a power outage.  Any bitcoin vendor that had an access point set up something along the lines of a piratebox with a local bitcoind could still transact without power in a similar manner that they can transact cash only without power.  The corner store might not have power to run the milk reefer, but a battery backed access point that had Internet up to the point of the power failure can still use bitcoin to sell milk and butter at half-off.  I think that if bitcoin ever starts to grow, we will see such piratebox-like devices show up at the local Farmers' Market and the craft show.  The vendors that wish to sell products via bitcoin will make sure it happens.

http://canyoucrackit.co.uk/

A novel way for a cybersecurity company to find qualified applicants.  If you live in the UK, and need a job, give it a go.

If you have a question, then ask it here.  We will see it regardless of which thread you wish to ask it in.

Indeed, seems like we are trying to do too many things at once here.  The anonymous renting of bandwidth is a completely different problem than mobile meatspace bitcoin transactions.  The latter is actually easy with bluetooth or QR codes.  I presented the piratebox point only as an example of widely useful supporting infrastructure, which would allow customers to update their wallets.  But updating the wallets are not a requirement for a simple transaction.  Would be in the interests of the bitcoin accepting vendors, however, since a lightweight phone client can have more than enough actual BTC to make more than one transaction; but depending upon how those BTC are stored on the lightweight client, a user might not be able to spend all of his phone wallet without updating in order to get the block that has his change from previous transactions.

Okay, but that is a different use case then you presented.  And this one is satisfied easily by a modified Serval app.  The problem is that most people don't let their wifi radio say on, because it eats power, and bluetooth is too short ranged to even do this across a relatively small restraunt.  Blutooth is practially limited to a range of about 10 feet with a direct line of sight, less if one or both phones are in a pocket next to the human body, which kills the band that Bluetooth uses (along with wifi) because of the water in the human body.  This would work incrediblely well with a running Dash7 radio in phones, but we would have to wait until those became common.  I don't even know if they ever will, Zigbee sure didn't.  Furthermore, it takes up to 2 seconds just to negotiate a new Bluetooth session, and that's before the clients can negotiate a bitcoin for forwarding access transaction.  It takes even longer for bluetooth to determine that a connected device has left range, so when you walk out of the room, it would take at least 10 seconds for your friends' phones to reconnect to anything else.  And then you have the same problem with this as you do with a fake piratebox setup, anyone can write an app that pretends to accept those automatic payments and then serves a 401 page. Or even an app that keeps disconnecting and reconnecting under another spoofed name, draining your budgeted wallet.

IMHO trying to mesh with Bluetooth is doomed to failure.  It's practical range is too short, and it's session connect time too long.  Users sitting next to each other in a conference seminar would be able to mesh, but not users sitting on opposite ends of a single row of seats.  Users would have to deliberately stay in range to transact, which is fine for one-to-one transacting, but it doesn't allow for opprotunistic propagation of transactions.  Something along the lines of Forban might work, but it would be clunky. (http://www.foo.be/forban/) Setting your smartphone to autoconnect to a piratebox set up in the vendor's room for the purpose at the beginning of the convention would be about as automatic as I imagine that you can get.

EDIT:

If you're headed to a bitcoin convention, I can't imagine why the convention itself wouldn't sponsor the piratebox + bitcoind, connect the piratebox to a wired lan, port forward the local bitcoind and maybe all bitcoin traffic, and block everything else.  Then set up signs in the space chosen for this to inform attendees that this is the place to take your smartphone to bootstrap if you don't have Internet access.

You seem to have two conflicting goals here.  You want a seamless & automatic system, but also want to do it without considering supporting infrastructure.  I don't think that's possible, but if it is, something like Serval is what you wish to emulate...

http://www.servalproject.org/

Unfortunately, serval requires root access for at least some of the serval phones, which then function in exactly the same manner that a piratebox + Internet access point would.

This is a piratebox...

http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox

The two techs could be combined as well.  A single piratebox is cheaper than a single smartphone capable of running as a serval 'batphone'.  I've tried it on my Samsung Intercept, and it doesn't have the moxy to run as a batphone, but my android is on the slow end of smartphones these days.

Say, as an example, you wanted to set up a piratebox like wifi access point that you could take with you anywhere, and sell short term shared Internet access for a bitcoin fee.  This is how I would do it.

I'd add a full bitcoind to the piratebox, with it's own dedicated drive space as well as a small squid space.  I'd set it up like a capture point, to direct new connections to my capture page with instructions and a bitcoin payment address.  This could be static and local, but if it was neither then I could have more than one such pirate box that users could move from one to another.  I would charge for the day/event not by volume, but also redirect bitcoin ports so that they lead back to the local bitcoind, and only allow that bitcoind outside access.  This prevents a new user from trying to bootstrap over my connection, he can get all the blocks he needs from the bitcoind.  I'd then block ports such as bittorrent, etc.  I'd take it with me to the game/convention/Burning Man/whatever so that the non-local crowd can pay me to share my unlimited 4G/WiMax plan, but limit the number of connected users to some rational shared Internet amount, say 32 connections.  If a connection is idle for more than 5 minutes, boot it to let another connect.  Make these conditions known, and then charge a rational fee for access for the entire event, say 1 BTC for the day/concert or 2 BTC for the entire convention, whatever.  Not much.

That's how I'd handle resaling internet.  But just a disconnected piratebox with a high connection limit and a running bitcoind would be fine to just allow people to transact without also sharing Internet.  This setup fits into a lunchbox and can run off a battery for hours.  Still kick connections if they are idle too long, to limit the number of connections and when people need to transact, they just connect again.  A convention hall could sport a number of these disconnected devices without the need for them to even be connected to each other, so long as the owner was willing and able to update their blockchain at least once each day.  A specialized app for this purpose could be developed to allow the owner to update a piratebox without it's own Internet connection via his smartphone's data plan.  Just download the most recent static image of the blockchain, upload to the piratebox, reboot and restart bitcoind.

This isn't the same use case as my Jabber + Dash7 + Bitcoin idea, however.

I let him know how I felt about him too.  +1 on the morning-daily-check thread.

You guys are really overthinking this use case.  In the use case of mobile bitcoin at a confrence or any other close locality, all that is needed to support local bitcoin payments for those without direct Internet access is a single piratebox within line of sight of both parties, running a bitcoind with a fairly current blockchain, that both users can connect to.  It's always in the interest of the receiver to get the transaction to the network, so that's not really an issue.  It'll happen.  But the piratebox would permit any number of connected devices to share transactions among themselves regardless of whether they were bluetooth capable or ad-hoc aware devices or not.  Payments to the piratebox owner isn't necessary either, because it's likely going to be owned by one or more of the vendors there who desire to trade in bitcoin.  If the business is good enough, it's also in the interest of the router owner/vendor to connect the piratebox to the Internet to keep the bitcoind updated directly, or possiblely to offer Internet access via the piratebox for a bitcoin payment.

Scripted transactions would be able to pay for intermediaries, but micropayments would still likely require a parrallel system.  I don't have the details worked out, but both Dash7 and the Jabber protocol are inherently location aware.  A modified jabber protocol that permits forwarding routers to add an address to the end of the text would allow the receiver to save up such addresses and then create a send-to-many transaction to micropay hundreds of routers.  Routers would either forward on the faith of payment, or simply not participate.  Alternatively, an echo text from the receiver back to the sender could tally the addresses for the sender to make the payment, which would also function as a confirmation of receipt of message, but would double the traffic, costs and number of addresses.  I'm open for suggestions, but even a modified Jabber client that can use the Dash7 network or the Internet at will would be a huge boon even if it's all voluntary and unpaid.  You can set your Dash7 radio to forward messages, or not, and the receiver can choose to tip, or not; at a later time.  Of course there will be many free riders, but there will also be many people who don't mind forwarding Dash7 frames so long as it doesn't drain the battery on their own phone, which it shouldn't.  Dash7 is so energy efficient that the hardware that allows your cell phone to turn off and on it's wifi radio via software would require more power.  But then, it's also slow by comparison.  Texting and bitcoin transactions to the local space (not forwarded, necessarily) would be okay, but downloading whole blocks would become oppressive in a successful bitcoin future.  More likely, the Dash7 radio would be always on, and the Bitcoin client could turn on and off the wifi radio for ad-hoc networking when it knows that a source of newer blocks came into wifi range.  If wifi access points started having Dash7 radios as well, your cell client would know it's relative position, any access issues, and it's relative vector (and thus an estimate of how long it would be in range) long before it was actually in range.  The same for other cell phones.  You could have a smartphone like device without a service, go to a ball game, and entirely bootstrap the device from zero without thinking about the device at all simply by letting the device use both Dash7 and wifi at it's own will to gather up the blocks it needs.  Transactions that travel over Dash7 would likewise be unstoppable, even though they could be delayed.  You could use such a serviceless device to board the commuter train, but on your way you walk past two blocks of other people,  unknown to you, your device passively gathers up a half dozen transactions from within listening range before you hit the train terminal.  The train has to have the infrastructure required to support bitcoin devices, so it has at least a wifi router that permits open access to bitcoin's port number.  When you connect to that in order to pay your fare, the device forwards the rest of the transactions to the network at large.

Yes and no.  The versioning of a delayed transaction is only possible with the scripting mech, which doesn't actually exist in the mainline client yet.  So at present, the answer is no.  Also, scripting won't ever be free, becase you are asking miners to actually process something for you personally.  Expect higher fees for scripted transactions, but once implimented, scripted transactions will be able to do a great many cool things, many of which don't really have any direct equivilant in the real world.  Multiplely addressed coins is one of them.  You will be able to send the same coins to more than one address, and dictate to the future network that those coins can only be used again under your stated conditions.  For example, you could send them to a set of addresses, and require that the claiming address have an additional keycode; so it's like you are putting up a prize for a compatition.  Or you could require that more than one of the addresses must sign the next transaction, requiring that more than one of the recipents have to get together to spend the coins.  There are a number of ways that this scripting mech can be used to create escrowed transactions.

As far as using soundcard modes to encode data into an actual audiostream, the number of mics and speakers (and people who talk) is counterproductive, as it basicly all creates a high level of background static for the signal to overcome, and PSK31 doesn't exactly promote a pleasant feeling in human listeners.  And it's also obvious to anyone who has heard it before.  433mhz is a relatively quiet band, and can mesh well over useful ranges, unlike wifi bands.  I consider the success of Dash7 devices in smartphones to be the greatest possibility for Bitcoin, and a Dash7 specific p2p texting app to be the killer bitcoin app there.  Imagine that even a small percentage of smartphones had dash7 radios in an urban area such as NYC, and you wanted to send an encrypted text to your friend.  You know your friend's dash7 id (or rather your phone does) and you use bitcoin to pay very small amounts to the smartphones of those who "hop" the text to it's destination (or forwards it across the Internet on your behalf, if that is more efficient) and your text could cross up to 7 or so kilometers without any infrastructure in place at all, or you having a service plan.  This would also work very well as an unstoppable communications medium in the event of a power outage (or Internet outage) for emergency communications.  It would make efforts like Serval look downright primitive in comparison.  What if, instead of smartphones with a monthly service fee, someone starts making smartphone sized android tablets (already done) with wifi & dash7 radios (not done) and young people start using them to communicate directly using texting & bitcoin in a modern version of the CB radio craze of the 1970's.

I admit that a moonbounce transaction would be just geek chic for the hell of it, but from a practical standpoint, using an amateur radio sat to do the same thing would be at least as location anonymous, which is to say not very much from any nation-state entity that has sats of their own.  And the location anonimity is exactly why we have to transmit our callsigns regularly, anonymouns transmissions are not permitted, and neither are business transactions.  Either of these would get my license suspended in a heartbeat.  I've had mine suspended for forgetting to update the FCC when I moved two miles away.  Bitcoin transactions over ham gear on ham bands could actually violate international treaties, and then get me arrested.  I don't like the risks there.  It's not like it used to be, it's technically quite easy to triangulate a transmitter broadcasting in the frequency ranges capable of exiting the troposphere to make a moonbounce or sat repeat.  It's the very low bands that remain location non-specific, simply because their wavelength is so long that a hidden antenna in an urban environment wouldn't implicate anyone in particular.  Which is also why numbers stations use the shortwave radio bands.  And soundcard encoding type modes, such as psk31, don't really do well with either moonbounce or a polar propogation path, because both forms of indirect (non-line-of-sight) propogation can arbitrarily reverse the orientation of the signal, the practical effect being that the signal changes because phase shift keying involves the intentional reversal of the orientation of the signal. 

Which means that you paid for them indirectly through your electric bill, I suppose.

Not for me.  My children are homeschooled.  Try it, it's way easier to teach them then to fix them.

Probably because you likely bought over $17.  I haven't bought any more since they were 6.5 cents, yet.  Getting kinda thin though, so I'm going to have to buy some more soon.

Maybe that's why it's rising, early buyers are running out of old funds and need to order Christmas gifts online?  If so, then the rise will be short lived and fall back some after Xmas.