I am SO looking forward to see an anarcho-socialist answer this question...

Edit:  there is obviously an answer in the anarchism FAQ :
<<
I.5.8 What about crime?

For anarchists, "crime" can best be described as anti-social acts, or behaviour which harms someone else or which invades their personal space. Anarchists argue that the root cause for crime is not some perversity of human nature or "original sin," but is due to the type of society by which people are moulded. For example, anarchists point out that by eliminating private property, crime could be reduced by about 90 percent, since about 90 percent of crime is currently motivated by evils stemming from private property such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and alienation. Moreover, by adopting anarchist methods of non-authoritarian child rearing and education, most of the remaining crimes could also be eliminated, because they are largely due to the anti-social, perverse, and cruel "secondary drives" that develop because of authoritarian, pleasure-negative child-rearing practices (See section J.6 -- "What methods of child rearing do anarchists advocate?")
>>

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionI5#seci58

Personnaly, I'm not convinced.

Even if it stays a niche, it will be enough for me.   Many things, not only precious metals, are not accepted as paiement, and still have a lot of trading value.  Luxury items, or collectionnable things (such as stamps, or art).

Even if bitcoin doesn't go mainstream, it can still have a real success.

Of course it would be nice if bitcoin gains some popular success, but to me it's absolutely not necessary.

Well, I don't sell grams for 8 BTC, but for 500 BTC, because there's still the risk bitcoins don't succeed, or that an other block chain gains more popularity.

I might consider higher bids, though.  Check out my web page http://grondilu.freeshell.org/bitXmetal.html.

I've done that on my prefered linux distribution forum :  aptosid.

http://www.aptosid.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=219

I even proposed to buy the bitcoins they would collect.

All I got was a polite decline.


Edit:  well, I've just insisted a bit, though.

This is a very naive approach concerning a theoretical price of gold in bitcoins.

Let's say there are about 170,000 tons of gold on Earth's surface (both above and below ground).

If we just divide this quantity by 21 millions of bitcoins, we get a price of about 8 BTC for one kilogram of gold.

Now I know, this amount looks ridiculously small, but somehow this encourages me to sell my gold for bitcoins :-)

I very much doubt that a fork would include a fork of the block chain.  I think it would consist of a fork of the software, that would be launched from a brand new block chain.

Ok now I understand better.

BTW, isn't this kind of standardisation supposed to be the job of IEEE and OSI ?

Two other questions :

Considering that it's very likely that keynesianism oriented people will try to modify the protocol in the future, how confident are you that there will never be more than 21 MBTC ?

Also, do you think the current block chain will be the definitive one ?

Personnaly I don't care if no businesses accept bitcoins.  As long as I can buy some on some plateform exchanges, or via mail, I don't care at all.

Businesses don't accept bitcoin, nor they accept gold or silver coins.  And still, gold and silver worth much more than national currencies.

The fact that no one knows anything about bitcoins doesn't mean anything to me.

Unfortunately, there is a consensus in mainstream economists, which states that deflation is bad for economy as it discourage investments.  Bitcoin will certainly have to face critics about this. 

Fortunately, those critics are not new.  They were popular amongst people who managed to have governments abandon the gold standard.

To me, deflation and inflation are just economics phenomenae.  They are the adaptative result of an change in economics situation.  None of them is more healthy than the other.  Both allow capital and money to adjust to productivity and demand.  During gold standard, there were deflationist periods when there were big increases of wealth in the same time.

At some point, some people will ask for a change in the bitcoin protocol, in order to increase the number of bitcoins.  Hopefully, those people will just make a fork of bitcoin, and create their own currency, which would be, in my opinion, just about as crappy as present national currencies.   If I have to receive such coins on my computer, I will immediately sell them with contempt, and buy real bitcoins.

And if bitcoins were to be modified in order to allow arbitrary increase of the total amount, I will immediately sell all my bitcoins to buy gold and silver.

Well, to me this very forum and its website IS such an organisation.  I don't understand what we might need more.

Bitcoin4cash.com displays a rate of 0.105$/BTC.

I think it's the record high, isn't it ?


BTW, how does bitcoin4cash establish such price ?

Google does so many things, that sometimes we could just ignore a few things they do that are quite useful.

On of these is Google trends, which might be quite handy to watch bitcoin's popularity on the web :

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin

I hope this curve is gonna rise

I guess this could be in the wiki but I post it here first.

I've recently looked for a free alternative to TrueCrypt.

On my Debian system, I've found ecryptfs.  It seems nice because it doesn't require you to encrypt a whole partition.

First, install the package :

apt-get install ecryptfs-utils

Then, create a ~/Private directory.

Setup this directory as your encrypted directory with the command :

ecryptfs-setup-private

(you may need to load the ecryptfs module with modprobe or something)

You will be prompted for your login password and for a optionnal mount password.  Using only your login password is easier since it will save you the typing of an additionnal password.

Relog.

Move your wallet.dat file in your Private directory, and make a symlink :

mv .bitcoin/wallet.dat Private
ln -s $HOME/Private/wallet.dat .bitcoin

That's about it.

You can unmount your private dir with the ecryptfs-umount-private command.

This directory can be used for other sensitive files, such as .fetchmailrc, .ssh/id_dsa, .gnupg and so on.

Indeed the possibility to audit the amount already paid is a good idea.  It would be very easy with bitcoins, since all transactions are public.

Hum ?  What did I get wrong ?  I thought it would be ok.   I guess I didn't understand what base58 is exactly...  My bad.


edit:
ok I checked Satoshi's code (in base58.h), and now I know :

//
// Why base-58 instead of standard base-64 encoding?
// - Don't want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and
//      could be used to create visually identical looking account numbers.
// - A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.
// - E-mail usually won't line-break if there's no punctuation to break at.
// - Doubleclicking selects the whole number as one word if it's all alphanumeric.
//

IllSend1000BTCtoWhoEvrMakesDisAddr


Good luck




More seriously, I think this app is useless, but very much fun.  I'm looking forward to see a stable version.

It is a tool indeed.  But I think it is THE tool anarcap needs in order to become reality.

I haven't read all this thread but I'd like to say that keyneysianism makes me sick.   I've seen the part where Krugman promoted a "broken window" concept and I felt like vomiting.

Obviously nowadays democracy has indeed become inacceptable, for it has legalized theft, and only a small minority of bureaucrats and technocrats really benefit from it, by stealing people's fruit of labor, in order to maintain their way of life.

Anarcap is scary, but we just can't accept the direction social-democracies are taking.