Merry Saturnalia, everyone!

He's talking about business practices, not the nature of the business itself. For example, if I pay a contract killer to kill my wife, and he just takes my money without killing her, that would be a breach of contract (which is unethical), and I have a right to complain about his business practices. Frauds such as these are far too common in Bitcoinland, and we must put a stop to it!

It was definitely a scam site. No legitimate site will accept PayPal for bitcoins, due to the risk of chargeback fraud. Also, how much did you pay? 8 bitcoins are currently worth about US$108, and the very few legitimate sellers who do accept PayPal will charge a hefty premium on top of that to make up for the chargeback risk. If you paid less than US$108 for your coins, you were certainly scammed (scammers frequently offer "discounts" to trick people into using them instead of reputable traders).

Wait, what happened to Cuba?

You're thinking of Grover's algorithm. Shor's algorithm does indeed break ECDSA in polynomial time, though we're a very long way off a useful implementation. And note that Bitcoin public keys are 256 bits, not 160 bits - the hash is 160 bits, but this is not broken by Shor's algorithm.

The core design is anything that doesn't involve a hard-fork. So...

No, no, no, and yes if it ever happens.

If it'll shut up the people who keep complaining about lost coins, I'm all for it.

It won't increase the supply any more than the original limit, and in any case, most proposals for "expiring" old coins involve sending them to miners, ie, randomly distributing them according to computer power, which is exactly what will happen if ECDSA is ever broken. Remember, a lot of people will still be (unwisely) using old versions of Bitcoin long after ECDSA is broken (and it won't go from "completely safe" to "any key can be cracked in less than day" overnight, either), and it wouldn't be fair to effectively say to them "Hackers might steal your coins in the future, so we've arbitrarily decided to save them the trouble and steal them now."

The purpose is the protect email in transit: since email is a plaintext protocol, all unencrypted emails can be read by any server they pass through as they are routed to their destination. All those companies and governments have full access to all your email (whether it's legal for them to make use of it is another matter entirely). At least with Hushmail they need a court order to read it. Note that Hushmail isn't cheating anyone: they explicitly state that they won't protect you from this threat.

It's a very old story:

www.privatliv.com/hushmail_report.pdf

The moral of the story is, encryption won't help you if your private keys are controlled by somebody else, especially if that somebody openly admits that they'll compromise your private keys if they receive a court order to do so.

Light clients and web wallets already do exactly this. You and average Joe are free to use them if you want, and other people are free to not use them and run a full node instead if they want. That's decentralisation at work.

Wrong. Do more research. A Ponzi scheme is where you tell people that if they give you their money, you'll pay them back with interest. And you do, except that the interest isn't coming from actual business profits, it's just the money your investors originally gave you, plus the money from later investors. Naturally, once there aren't enough new investors putting more money in, the scammer won't be able to make the interest payments. The investors will demand their money back, only to find that their money's gone.

A pyramid scheme is similar, except instead of telling investors they'll receive interest on their payments, they receive money by recruiting more investors, and those new investors can make money by recuiting even more investors, until eventually there aren't enough investors left in the world to sustain the scheme and the investors on the bottom "layer" of the pyramid have no way of ever getting their money back.

Pyramid schemes differ slightly from multi-level marketing schemes, where there are real products involved, but even those schemes are shady (though not always technically fraudulent or illegal).

A bubble is when a real product, with real value (note that despite what some people say, bitcoins do have real value, as they enable fast and secure transactions in a way not possible with other currencies), is traded at much higher prices than its true value simply because people think its value is going up and they can sell it to a "greater fool" later on. While many people lose money when bubbles inevitably burst, they are not in themselves a scam unless someone is misrepresenting the true nature of the investment.

That's a pump-and-dump and is usually illegal.

Hey, I strongly engorge reading certain things too, and while philosophy isn't one of them, I am accepting of other people's preferences, however strange they may seem.

Ponzi schemes are illegal regardless of whether they involve "real" money or not. Whether it's dollars, bitcoins, WoW gold, actual gold, or pork bellies, it's still illegal.

That's a pyramid scheme, not a Ponzi scheme, which is also illegal for the same reason, though these site probably get away with it since there's nothing of real value involved.

The strangest part of Pirate's scam is that apparently nobody is willing to admit to the authorities that they were scammed, though I don't blame them. I mean, 3300% interest? Seriously? If I fell for a scam as stupidly obvious as that, I wouldn't admit it either.

I'll believe that when you can power a steam engine with your love. Until then, I'll keep eating food, you can keep eating nothing, and we'll see who lives longer.

That's actually an easy question to answer. The interest rate charged by the central bank (where private banks get their money from) is what's different in the U.S.:

Reserve Bank of Australia: 3.00%
U.S. Federal Reserve: 0.00-0.25%

Of course, that just raises further questions, which are less easy.

There are also currently no video games that are able to convincingly simulate the interactions of all the neurons in a human brain, ergo, thinking is impossible. Now stop doing it, because you're not doing a good job of it. Seriously, something will never be possible in real life because it's currently impossible in video games (which are bound by present, not future, technology)? What sort of logic is that?

He's got a good point about the shareholders. Corporations are indeed legally obligated to not waste their shareholders' money, so it may very well be illegal for them to not take advantage of any tax loopholes they can find. I wonder how Starbucks's shareholders are reacting...

You can easily configure Bitcoin to connect though Tor (in Options -> Network, turn on "Connect through SOCKS proxy" - the default proxy settings are for a standard Tor installation, though you will need to change them if your Tor setup is non-standard). You can also run Bitcoin as a hidden service, though (I'm pretty sure) other Tor nodes won't be able to connect to you automatically - to connect to hidden Bitcoin services, you need to manually set up each hidden service you want to connect to.

The wiki says that "...the network won't work if everyone does this. BitCoin requires that some country is still free." though I have no idea why it won't work. It seems to me like it should (though it would require some effort set it up), but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Of course not, that's just being a good citizen. Oh wait, you mean taking her to my home... What if I take her to my home first, then take her back to her home afterwards? Not stealing, just borrowing.

No, shops using such a company will accept only real bitcoins*, from anyone, at zero confirmations (which is almost instant). If such a transaction turns out to be a double-spend (which is extremely unlikely for low-value transactions), the company reimburses the merchant (naturally, the company will charge a small fee for this service to cover the costs of the double-spends). This is exactly the same as how chargeback insurance works with credit cards.

*There seems to be a persistent idea that layering additional financial services on top of bitcoin (such as fraud protection or fractional reserve lending) requires the creation of new "fake" bitcoins (or rather, bitcoin-denominated bearer instruments) that are only redeemable for "real" bitcoins by a central issuer. I'm not really sure where this idea came from, but it's completely false.