I think the right approach is to build protocols and software that allow anyone to create any kind of marketplace they want and link them together into a searchable distributed database.

Not every user of such a platform would make online black markets, but if it were designed properly it wouldn't be possible to stop anyone who wanted to.

Pie charts and area graphs.

This is getting ridiculous.

Why don't any of these exchange volume comparison sites make a simple, easy to read graph that shows total BTC exchanged per exchange?

Is it not as simple as summing the various currency pairs for those exchanges which support multiple currencies?

There are a few things in there that I'm skeptical about. Like the Jesuits controlling China, and the mention of the state governors going after the corruption sounds a bit like this meme that was going around last year: http://www.knowthelies.com/node/7274

The allegations of corrupt dealings at the World Bank, though, are consistent with reports from other whistleblowers.

It would be cool if the Satoshi client, btcd, and BoP could all use the same APIs to talk to the various components such that the components become interchangeable.

In the long term, was the closure of Napster good or bad for P2P file sharing?

Bad because of the people who lost bitcoins.

Good because the next generation of successor sites will be even more resilient.

In the long term the seizure serves as a form of innovation stimulus.

Now I'll add on "disingenuous" to "authoritarian". Instead of owning up to what you said, you're now trying to obscure the issue by subtly rewriting history to change your quote into something other than what it was.

You didn't say "DPR was A and B", you said "Because DPR was A and B, we shouldn't be surprised of C".

Let's replace B with a different adjective, just to make the bigotry blindingly obvious for all the spectators:

"By the way - I'm amazed at how many people are surprised that a drug dealer with extreme black tendencies turned out to be not a swell guy! Imagine that!"

You'd never dare say something like that in public, because that group isn't an socially acceptable target for bigotry any more, but you're more than willing to smear anarcho-capitalists the same way because you think no one will call you out on it.

Even with the cooperation of the core devs I don't see that being effectively enforced. How do you make all the Chinese, Russian, and European miners and nodes play ball?

You're an "authoritarian asshole" because you turned an unproven allegation into an indiscriminate political smear against an entire philosophical discipline, including some of the top thinkers in the world today and some of the highest profile and staunchest Bitcoin supporters.

You didn't condemn contracted murder, you used contracted murder as an excuse to condemned people who disagree with you politically.

We don't know if DPR actually did what he is accused of or not. If he did it's a vile thing to do.

Despite no one here having any way of verifying the truth or falsehood of the allegations, some people are more than happy to to use it to advance their own unrelated agenda. For those people, I doubt the truth actually matters.

That also includes Jeffery Tucker, Roger Ver, Jeff Berwick, Stefan Molyneux, and quite a few others. Maybe Mike Hearn can publicly debate them sometime, if he's got something more than insults to bring to the table.

This comment reveals a lot more about your character than DPR's.

The worst part about the arrest is how it brings all the compliance trolls out of the woodwork.

Do these changes make it upstream into the main repository?

Nodes choose the chain with the highest accumulated difficulty work, not the longest chain.

If you're trying to build a cryptocurrency representation of fiat that does not require a banking interface the result is going to look more like LocalBitcoins on steroids than a traditional financial product.

Some entity could issue synthetic digital dollars to individuals on a P2P trading platform who promise to redeem them in the future for traditional dollars. Their performance can be insured by placing an appropriate amount of bitcoins in escrow. Now you have an effectively unregulated swarm of exchange agents who create the interface with the outside world and a digital representation of dollars that could be traded anywhere, including darknet-hosted virtual currency exchanges.

Something like this could almost be built on Ripple, but their trust model has no concept of limited trust - they only allow you to represent indefinite duration revolving loans.

I think it could be built on Open Transactions though, as that platform is a lot more capable.